The Girl Who Died
by brightstarff
Summary: "Asami Sato dreamed every night. That in itself may not have been remarkable, but the dreams were always hazy. Confusing. Blue. / Korra dreamed every night. They weren't nightmares, quite. / 'You're not alone.'" Two lonely hearts and the story of how they eventually found each other-the muggle and the Girl Who Died. Harry Potter AU set in the US. (Changed category from Cross-over)
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: I've been sitting on this for a while-I have about 10,000 words already written. Sorry to those who were waiting on my other fic for Dragon Age, but this one wouldn't leave me alone until I started writing it._

_In case you can't pick it up from the summary or what follows, this is a Korra/Asami AU taking place in the Harry Potter world. However, I've set it in the US for a number of reasons (head over to my tumblr-same username-to ask if you want the specifics). There will be a lot of fun worldbuilding, etc. It also isn't going to try to mirror the tone of the HP series, since it will end up focusing primarily on Korra as a young adult, so the tone will be a bit darker. So-Harry Potter, but not. There are a couple of HP AUs around for LoK already that take place at Hogwarts and I recommend them!_

_Anyway, I hope you enjoy what I've started here. This is going to be a long and epic ride (hopefully) that will incorporate themes from both HP and from Korra (because I think there are some interesting overlaps). Familiarity with both series will help, but I hope I've written it in such a way that people unfamiliar with one or the other won't get lost._

* * *

"Where is the child?" he asked, stooping low in the house. He was so tall that the beams in the ceiling brushed the top of his head even as he leaned forward, attempting to peer into the dark recesses of the home.

The crowd of people hesitated, and a howling wind filled the silence. He glanced outside and saw only a few desperate snowflakes whipped by the wind. Turning his gaze back to the muggles, he repeated his question, hoping to leave before a blizzard rolled over the small city: "Where is the child?"

A woman weaved her way through the crowd, pushing through their uncertainty with ease. "This way," she said, and he noted the calmness in her voice. His eyes twitched over her, and he saw the shape of a wand concealed under her sweater, barely distinct in the half-light. But he was trained to notice these things. Nodding, he followed her into the dark room.

The door shut behind them, and all at once a pale blue erupted, so bright he instinctively shielded his eyes, his wand leaping into his hand in a half-remembered reflex. He noted, too, that the howling outside seemed to have receded, that an eerie silence accompanied the strange, pulsing light, and for the first time in many years, he felt a nervous rhythm erupt in his veins.

"It's alright," the woman said into the heavy stillness, and he cautiously lowered his arms. She was standing still, calm and unperturbed, but he noticed a certain thinness about her lips. He noticed, too, that she wasn't looking at him, but straight into the heart of the light.

And he turned his gaze to it too, though it was so bright that his eyes watered for the first long moments. Approaching slowly, he began to make out a shadowy form hidden in the center of the light, surprisingly small and still. Vaguely, he made out the outline of a young girl, perhaps ten or eleven, curled up on the bed.

It seemed unlikely, he thought, his eyes adjusting finally to the brightness. It seemed unlikely that such a tiny thing could have restored balance, could have pushed back the darkness that had nearly overwhelmed half the world.

Yet here she was, and the world had returned to its rhythms. The snow outside was proof of that.

As was the blue glow, he amended in his mind. The original glow of the tear had been visible all the way from New York, pulsating in the far northwest. Muggles had blamed it on some sort of inexplicable atmospheric phenomenon, but the wizarding community had seen it for what it was: devastating evidence of approaching chaos. Various organizations had investigated the glow, found it just outside a small city in southwestern Alaska, and determined that it had somehow increased magical activity a hundred-fold.

After its appearance, he spent years hunting down magical beasts that seemed to materialize up in the middle of city streets, dark wizards and witches with power previously thought unimaginable. He spent years, himself, benefiting from the sudden influx in power. Young witches and wizards had been unable to hide their abilities from their peers, their magic so suddenly powerful that the slightest movement betrayed it. Everything had been threatened. Their entire society had been compromised and the International Wizarding community was at a loss.

Then, suddenly, nothing. It had vanished without warning, and they spent months obliviating millions of muggles in North America and eastern Asia, had formed entire teams dedicated to erasing any trace of magic from their minds systematically.

He had been the first official to receive the report of this young girl, glowing an unearthly blue. He had been the first to hear the strange tale.

So here he was, gazing down on her in her rest. No one was sure whether she was alive or dead, or something horrifyingly stuck in between. Despite his training, he felt distaste at what he must do next. He turned to the girl's mother, and this time, she was looking at him, her mouth still pressed into that thin line and her eyes full of resignation.

She had contacted his organization. He had no idea how she'd found out about them, but here they were, and now she was facing the reality of what, exactly, she'd asked of him.

Tenzin was the only one who had access to enough resources to possibly save her while still protecting her from the people hunting her. Even now, rumors circulated about the girl, but the large groups of muggles kept magical journalists away from the scene.

"Wait until the night," she said, her shoulders tensing as she crossed her arms. "That crowd has been there for days, trying to get word of what's going on and leaving food. It's been hard keeping the muggle doctors away. I'm sure there's a wizard or two in disguise out there. If we walk out of here with her now, you'll just have to obliviate them."

Resigning himself to battling the elements on his way out, he nodded his head once. "And the light? How often does she…?" He trailed off, looking back at the girl, unable to decide how to describe the effect.

"Only when someone enters the room, it seems. Well, only when a witch or wizard enters the room."

For once, he felt curiosity tingle in his bones. A mystery. He had always liked puzzles. And he had a favorite theory about this one, too, though he kept it mostly to himself. No need to make waves back at headquarters.

He left the room as he had come: stooping, his mind full of questions that could not be answered, concealing his wand and pouches from the muggles with practiced ease. Later, he would return in the silence of the night. The girl's mother would be waiting, her mouth still thin and her calm composure cracked with the trembling of her hands.

"She's been waiting for a letter to school. She was so excited to travel somewhere new," her mother would say softly. Her husband would stand in the background, silently watching, his jaw squared against an invisible enemy.

He would nearly say, "We'll take care of her," but he stopped himself. It would be a promise he couldn't keep.

So instead the tall man would leave with a handful of letters shoved into his hand and the sound of a desperate, keening breath ringing in his ears as the woman leaned into the blue light to say farewell to her only child.

"Goodbye, Korra."

The memory would haunt Tenzin for the rest of his life. He would return with the child frequently, but always under the cover of night, always briefly, for her protection—and for the organization's own purposes.

And, for the rest of his life, he would try to make up for it. Somehow.

It was the first crack in his training.

* * *

Their arrival in New York City was leaked to the press. Tenzin shouldn't have been surprised, but he felt frustrated nonetheless, clutching watery coffee in one hand and a tabloid in the other. The waiting room was quiet in the early hours, and he savored the brief moment of respite before the healers began bombarding him. With little else to do, he scanned the article.

_THE GIRL WHO DIED?_

_Many decades after the heroic defeat of Voldemort at the hands of The Boy Who Lived, the Wizarding World was rocked by a new magical catastrophe. For reasons yet unknown, a mysterious beacon of light erupted in Alaska, bringing with it a surge in magical power and making it difficult for wizards and witches to stay hidden. The Magical Congress worked round the clock to defeat dark wizards and creatures._

_Several months ago, however, it all stopped. The Magical Congress has insisted they don't know the reason for stopping it. Are they telling us everything they know?_

There was a big, moving picture of a battle that seemed eerily familiar. When he squinted, he was able to make out the small form of Korra darting around spells in the background.

_The fighting was the worst near the tear. No one knows why, but some suspect the tear was intentionally caused by people with ulterior motives, having spotted some dark wizards wearing faceless masks. We have no record of any such wizards at this time._

_Rumors have spread that a young local girl, upset at the fighting, approached the tear and leaped into it. According to several sources who wish to remain anonymous, she appeared to have vanished entirely for several days before reappearing at the site of the now-closed tear, apparently dead. But when she was approached, a strange and powerful magic kept most people away._

_So where is she now? What happened? There are several conflicting stories, but a source spotted a mysterious man in Alaska. Another source saw the same man conversing with medical professionals in New York. The Magical Congress denies any affiliation with the man. Who is he? What is the Congress hiding? Is he a dark wizard? Is The Girl Who Died with him?_

Sighing, he tossed aside the paper. They had enough information to make his job difficult. His superiors would not be pleased.

A nearby receptionist called for him. He abandoned his watery coffee and approached the desk, where he was handed a gold letter. Already knowing its contents, he nonetheless opened it and read through the elaborate calligraphy.

"Where is the post room?" he asked.

Minutes later, he was tying a letter to a pigeon's leg. He frowned at it, unhappy with the letter, feeling it was inadequate and forced, but knowing he had little choice. He set the bird down, and it immediately pressed itself through a hinged panel in the wall and leaped out into the gray afternoon. Leaning into a nearby window, he watched it disappear into the low fog. The tall buildings of the city stood as silent sentinels in the early morning.

Tenzin knew it would be several days before his mother got his note.

* * *

They'd placed them in a house in the hills in Massachusetts, far enough from town that the locals wouldn't notice them and far enough from any cities that the wizarding presses would not be alerted.

The drawback was, of course, that there was little to do.

Tenzin sat on the porch and watched the sun come over the distant trees. He wondered what the muggles thought, looking into their natural world, where no magical beasts roamed and their pigeons primarily stayed grounded, where the best one could do to heal was to cut someone open and sew them closed again.

Inside, he could hear the light footsteps of his mother, hurrying about the living room. The house had come equipped with all of the magical supplies she would need. Rare plants, potions, and ingredients lined the walls. Sometimes, he was grateful for his superiors' foresight.

Sometimes.

His mind wandered to the young girl lying huddled in the house. The blinds were drawn, but he could still see the eerie blue glow from outside. He thought of her parents, too, wondering what they were doing, wondering if they had heard she had been in New York.

Every so often, his ears still rang with her mother's final words: "Goodbye, Korra."

Tenzin wondered what kind of child Korra was.

Tenzin wondered if he would ever find out.

It had taken his mother a few days to come down from Canada, and she had been delayed by the increased security at the border. Eventually, though, they'd let her through, realizing exactly who she was.

For the past few years, his mother had been on the forefront of the tear, treating thousands of casualties with efficiency and care. Soon, his superiors had contracted her for her expertise—her knowledge of magical plants and herbs and her natural gift for potions were so great that she seemed the only one able to heal the injuries faced by the organization.

She had resented him for it, in the end, had resented being used like a tool for a group of people she wasn't sure she supported, entirely, a group of people she sometimes still blamed for the loss of his father.

It was the first time he'd seen or talked to her in months, and he felt awkward and adolescent under the scrutiny of her stern gaze.

_"Involving children in your plots now?" she'd said when they met in front of the house. The bitterness in her voice had stung._

_"She will attend school like any other witch or wizard," he'd replied, eyes averted. "But there is much more going on here than anyone could imagine. We must keep her safe and secluded until she is under the protection of the school in a year."_

_For a moment, she'd studied him, the lines in her face more pronounced during her frown. Then she softened slightly, and she turned away. "I know—even if you can't tell me the details. Poor child," she'd murmured, peering into the blue light._

Tenzin frowned at the memory. Something seemed…off about his mother, now that he'd thought about it. Her uncharacteristic relenting, her immediate interest in Korra…

His reverie was interrupted by Katara's voice.

"She's awake."


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: I was hoping to hang onto this one a bit more to edit it, but I'm excited for what's coming up in the chapter after this one. I also just realized, at 11 PM, that I have to start and finish and entire project by tomorrow, and I'll be busy the next few days. So I posted it despite some of my misgivings._

_A quick note for continuity's sake: wizards and witches canonically live longer than muggles._

* * *

"It's alright," he said, lowering his wand. The _protego maximum_ charm fell away and he felt very, very tired. Around them, the blue light flickered and receded back into the young girl. Her eyes glowed brightly before she slumped forward onto her hands, breathing heavily. Tears made uneven tracks down her cheeks. A few trees around them had disintegrated into smoking, wooden fragments at the strength of his shield charm.

"I can't do it, Tenzin," she mumbled, the words slightly garbled in the mess of her tears. Her hair had come loose during the lesson and it stuck to her wet skin.

Awkwardly, Tenzin inched forward. None of his training had prepared him for dealing with a crying ten-year-old he didn't know very well. He crouched down and put his hand on her thin shoulder, relieved when she didn't immediately erupt into blue light.

They had only been working for a few days to get the blue magic under control, but they hadn't made much progress. If Korra was to return, in any capacity, to the wizarding world, she would need to be able to control whatever strange magic the tear had imbued her with. Unfortunately, she didn't seem to remember what happened at all, her last memory being a strange tale of a fight against some dark magic, wild creatures, and then a harrowing flight to the tear itself. After that, she had said, was darkness, long and long and long, until she'd awoken to Katara's kind face.

He offered a small consolation: "We have time." He wasn't entirely sure it was true, but it would have to do. They had a short year to prepare Korra for enrollment if she was going to live any kind of normal life.

_"Goodbye, Korra."_

And Tenzin felt personally responsible for making that happen.

Sitting back on his heels, he pondered the young girl, whose breath slowly eased into normal patterns. She wiped her hand on her nose and sniffed loudly. He wondered what his father would do, in this situation. Something noble and heroic, he supposed.

His father…

An idea came to him.

"Let's go see about some dinner," he said, helping her to her feet. "Then I think we'll go visit an old friend." It would be dangerous, and he was sure the organization wouldn't be pleased at his reckless creations of portkeys, but it might've been the only chance they had.

_"The light is eating at her from the inside out," his mother had said as she packed her things. "I don't know what will happen, but if we don't control it soon…"_

It might've been Korra's only chance.

* * *

The past couple of weeks seemed to have been some sort of test for Tenzin, forcing him to interact with people he had once been close to.

"You're lucky I was fond of your dad, sourpuss," the old woman said, her foggy eyes staring at his shoulder. "I have a busy job, you know. Even if they are just waiting around for me to retire…or die. But it'll be at least forty years before that happens." When he began to speak, she held up her hand. "I don't know what you're up to, and I don't care, so save your breath." He let out the breath he'd taken in order to speak. She paused and tilted her head in what he recognized as curiosity. That boded well, at least, if her aggravation with him didn't. "What's your name, kid?"

Tenzin felt the girl shift next to him. Though she was still frightened by the ordeal she'd gone through, he sensed a stubbornness and strength about her, and he glanced over to see her clench her jaw.

"Korra," she said, stepping forward. The city lights reflected off the murky water and onto her dark skin, and the night seemed to recede a little when she moved. Tenzin swore he caught a hint of blue. He glanced around, still uncertain whether it was wise to return to New York soon, but also knowing they had little other choice. They would leave as soon as possible.

Toph hummed. "So you're the 'girl who died,' huh? Tiny thing." Without warning, she pulled her wand out of the inner pocket of her robe and pointed it directly at the girl. "_Stupefy!_"

Immediately, the bright, violent blue light enveloped the girl, exploding out of her in a massive concussion. Tenzin managed to cast a shield charm around himself. Still, he felt the blast pushing him backward, the blue searing into his eyes, overwhelming him, singing in his veins the way magic had when the tear was open—

And then it stopped. Panting, he lowered his arms, his wand sparking slightly from the overflow of magic. Toph stood unruffled and threw her head back as she laughed into the night sky, her wand shimmering with a cold and unruly blue.

"Toph!" Tenzin managed to yell. His lungs clenched with exhaustion. "What—I'm sure a muggle saw that—" He glanced at the seemingly deserted buildings nearby.

"Relax, sourpuss," she said with a chuckle. She spread her hands and the blue dissipated from her wand. "No muggles here." She crouched down and tapped her wand on the ground. "Checked already. Well," she continued, sitting back on her heels with her head cocked in Korra's direction. "At least you brought me something interesting this time." The girl was crying again and shaking violently, the final blue tendrils evaporating like fog into the night. "Even if she is a crier."

At that, Toph's wand suddenly went spinning through the air and hit a wall with a quiet thud. Her head whipped around to the girl, whose eyes shone briefly before the normal, vibrant blue returned to her irises. "I'm not a crier," Korra said thickly, stumbling to her feet. She swayed slightly but managed to stay upright. For the first time that night, Tenzin saw the sarcasm drain out of the Head Patroller's face, and he thought it might have been surprise that flickered across her mouth.

Then she chuckled. "Come over here, kid," Toph said, lowering herself slowly to the ground and crossing her legs. She seemed unconcerned that her blue Patroller robes were most likely getting dirtied, but that wasn't a surprise to Tenzin. Toph never seemed worried about getting dirty. Hesitant to approach the woman who had unceremoniously attacked her, Korra paused and swayed a little on her feet. "Come on, come sit down. I'm tired of standing. I stand all day." A meaningful tilt of the head in his direction. "You too, sourpuss. Story time."

Sighing, Tenzin drew nearer and sat on the ground next to her, trying not to think about how dirty it probably was. Korra looked between them for a moment before hesitantly approaching. He nodded to her and, with an exhausted grunt, the girl fell to the ground in a sprawl of limbs. For a moment he was worried she'd collapsed, but she rolled onto her stomach and rested her head on her hands. Tenzin was beginning to realize that Korra, for all of her peacefulness while unconscious (_dead_ some part of him corrected in curiosity and horror), had a decidedly…not peaceful personality.

"You know why he brought you here?" Toph asked, jerking her thumb toward Tenzin. Sometimes he was almost frightened by her unerring ability to locate people, and she had once explained it had something to do with the way she could feel magic, that it seemed to hum in the air and the ground around them.

Korra paused, her blue eyes drifting shut for a moment before she refocused them with effort. "To help me get better?" she hazarded.

"Close enough," Toph said. "I'm able to detect the flow of magic better than anyone else in the world. I think Mr. Sunshine, over here, thinks I can maybe sense what's going on with you so we can block it or something." Tenzin stiffened at the new nickname, but Toph merely continued on, though he caught her thin lips quirking. "Unfortunately, he's wrong."

He felt his mouth drop open. "What—"

"Of course I can feel what's going on. I can feel it a lot better when I have my wand, which some kid happens to have knocked away." Korra looked a bit sheepish at that. "But there's nothing I can do to help you."

Fear overtook the girl's face and she pulled herself to her knees. "But—but there has to be something. It's…horrible. I can't control it," she said, her eyes watering again, though she stuck her chin out defiantly against the tears threatening to overwhelm her.

"Easy there," Toph said, and to Tenzin's surprise she reached out and placed a hand on Korra's shoulder. "Listen, you know magic's linked to emotions, right?" The girl nodded silently. "I'm going to assume you're nodding."

"Oh—uh, yeah," Korra mumbled, perhaps not having seen the fogginess of the woman's eyes before.

"Whatever that magical pillar of nastiness was," Toph tilted her head meaningfully in Tenzin's direction, "or whatever his people know about it that the rest of us don't, it obviously super-charged everyone, right?" Korra nodded, then stopped suddenly and squeaked out an embarrassed "yes," having forgotten the other woman couldn't see her. "Whatever you did when you closed it, it super-charged you with this blue magic. Which you probably guessed. The problem is you haven't learned how to control magic, yet, and you're too young for a wand. The blue stuff is what happens when you think you're under attack or you're afraid. Most kids just fly away or turn their attackers into pigs or something, but you turn into a giant magical bomb.

"I can sense the magic in you. It's sitting all coiled up right…" Toph lifted her hand and tapped the girl on the forehead. "…here."

"In my brain?" the girl said, going cross-eyed as she looked at the hand.

"Sort of," Toph continued. "The extra magic's all over, like veins, but it's mostly in your head. You're scared." When the girl opened her mouth to argue, Toph jabbed her finger into her forehead, making her tumble back onto the pavement with an 'oof.' "And you're scared of the blue stuff, too—don't argue, anyone with eyes—" she chortled a little to herself— "can tell. So you get scared, and then the blue magic takes over, and then you're afraid of the blue magic, so that just makes it worse. And then you nearly fry the rest of us."

Korra scrambled back to her knees, leaning toward Toph anxiously. "But I can't stop that!"

Tenzin frowned too, pulling at his beard in thought. "I was hoping there would be a spell, or something, that could block it."

Shaking her head, the Head Patroller got to her feet slowly. "Too damn old," she said with a grunt, various joints popping. "There might be some spell to dampen magic I don't know about," Toph admitted to Tenzin's surprise. "Though that's unlikely if you ask me. And if Katara couldn't think of a potion…well, best thing to do is accept it, kid. Accept that you're scared. Accept that the blue stuff isn't going away. Don't try to control it. Use it. Let it flow through you."

Tenzin stood too, pulling Toph to the side as Korra sat dejectedly on the pavement, looking at her hands. "Toph," he said, and she frowned at him. "No, listen—my mother said that the magic is going to consume her, eventually, if we don't get a handle on it."

The old woman merely chuckled. "You better get to work then, right? Isn't that your mystery job?" He turned to her in surprise. "Oh, I don't know anything more specific. Katara was annoyingly vague about what it is you and whoever it is you work for do, back when we were still fighting all that dark shit. But only my eyes are blind, sourpuss. I know they chose you to protect her for a reason. I know there must be a reason she needs to be protected. And I know that anything to do with you goes over my head at the station."

"But—"

"That's all the free advice you're getting from me tonight, and I'm only doing it for the kid. She seems tough." She reached up to pat his cheek patronizingly, missing a little and crushing his ear instead. "Anyone tell you you got huge ears? Must've gotten that from Twinkle Toes. Anyway, I have a real job to get to in the morning. Good luck, kid," she called to Korra, and then Disapparated with a crack that echoed off the surface of the nearby river.

For a moment, he simply stood, staring at the space she had just occupied and feeling entirely unsure of whether any of that was actually worth it. He heard Korra groaning as she got to her feet and he turned to her.

"Wow, she's cranky," she said, and for the first time in weeks, he laughed.

"You don't know the half of it." He walked over to her, grabbing her elbow as she swayed slightly. "Let's get back to the house before you keel over."

It would be months before Korra could channel the blue magic.


	3. Chapter 3

_A/N: I've been sitting on this one for a bit. I wanted to get further in the parts that come next before I wrote anything. Also, this is a bit longer than usual, since I'm not sure when I'll be able to update next (finals and all that over the next two weeks)._

_So, enjoy!_

* * *

Asami Sato dreamed every night. That in itself may not have been remarkable, but the dreams were always hazy. Confusing.

Blue.

She wasn't sure what they meant. When she woke, she felt exhausted, like she had been up all night instead of sleeping. The dreams felt more like memories, and when she returned to the waking world, the dream seemed to blend into it.

Asami was worried something was wrong with her.

Tonight, it was particularly bad—

_Blue light. Her mother was there, she thought, but her face was blurry, indistinct. Maybe framed by brown hair, maybe looking at her from kind, brown eyes. Maybe. But maybe also blue, blue, blue, everywhere._

_There was screaming. A flash of green lightning, interrupting the blue, and her mother was gone. In her place, her father, steely-faced, eyes hard, face yet unmarked by any lines or wrinkles._

_Then someone was touching something to her head, and she was screaming, begging, for something she wasn't sure, but she felt cold fear seeping through everything like darkness. And in fact it was—a darkness that spread out from her, inching forward, fighting away the hazy blue._

_And then a muttered word, something that almost sounded like English but not quite, and then the darkness smothered the blue._

When she started awake, she stumbled out of bed, blankets twisted around her ankles. She fell to the floor. The pain helped jolt her into the present, but the effect was like whiplash and her head spun a little as she tried to reorient herself. Sweat condensed on her forehead, uncomfortable and cold. She could feel her hair sticking to it.

For a long time, she simply lay there, staring at the intricate patterns painted on her ceiling and breathing heavily. The foggy margins of the dream began to recede, but some sense of reality still lingered about its edges. Even in the blurriness, there was still something sharp. Something clear.

But she couldn't figure out what.

Her mom had died several years ago. Asami didn't remember what happened, exactly, but her dad said it was a house fire.

The dreams, he said, were just her way of trying to deal with the repressed trauma. Or something.

Asami was only eleven, but she prided herself on her quick mind; she could already hold her own in engineering meetings with her father's company. So when her father would look away at the mention of her dreams, she began to doubt.

And fear.

She had no idea what they meant. She had no idea if they were really a memory. But her father was lying to her, and so they meant something. She was afraid of the dark boundary they represented—some unknown place hidden inside her, something frightening in its illegibility.

They weren't just dreams, and for an eleven-year-old, no matter how smart, that was terrifying.

* * *

Korra dreamed every night. They weren't nightmares, quite, but they were filled with shadowy forms and half-remembered faces.

They'd start with a real memory.

_Her, playing in the snow with the other children, the strange twilight of Alaskan summer nights falling over them. She'd always loved that, the way the dark blue bled into a hazy orange at the horizon, the way darkness was staved off for so long._

_It was magic._

_But there, the blue pillar of light, ripping the sky open, shredding the peaceful twilight. People screaming. Magic erupting like electricity along people's wands. Previously hidden magical creatures coming tumbling out of the arctic in fear. Muggles screaming._

Then the scene would shift to something hazy, something in between memory and dream, something between reality and a child's half-conjured imaginations:_ Her father was holding his wand, fighting a man in a dark robe. The man's face was a frightening blankness, illuminated in the glow of spells being flung around._

_He spoke, and his voice seemed to come from all directions: "Hand over the girl, Tonraq."_

_And then there was a blur of red, and green, and white, and suddenly the scene shifted again: Korra, riding out to the blue light on a muggle sled, a team of dogs guiding the way. Korra, stumbling off, panting, tears running down her cheeks, not sure if she would see her parents again._

_And the blue light. Whispering to her in a thousand voices she could understand in the dream, but could never remember while waking up._

_Somehow, though, it told her what she had to do._

_She approached it, her hand out. When she touched the blue pillar, she felt herself falling down, down, down. And then a long, long darkness waiting for her at the bottom. Waiting, and watching._

_And then she died._

They weren't just dreams.

Every time she used the blue magic, Korra heard the whispering, and she began to do things she couldn't control. Every time she used the blue magic, she died, over and over again, and something took her place.

So when Toph told her that the blue light was in her mind, that she needed to accept it, Korra felt both relieved and terrified.

Relieved, because it meant there was hope that she could be a normal kid. That she could go to school and make friends and maybe someday even go back home, when the scary men with blank faces (were their faces really blank?) weren't looking for her. She would be able to eat chocolate frogs and firecracker pops that went off in your mouth instead of the tasteless essentials Tenzin received by owl every morning. And maybe her mom would finally let her play quodpot.

And she was terrified, because accepting the blue light was like talking to the monsters under your bed. Like making a deal with ghosts or poltergeists or the abominable snow man that haunted the wide open ice of the arctic circle.

Korra wasn't sure she wanted to talk to the thing that lived inside her head.

Korra was afraid she would fall into it and end up in the long, long dark again.

It felt hungry.

* * *

One day, she ran away. Tenzin had become frustrated and irritable when she complained about Legilimency. It frightened her when she felt him in her mind, even though she knew it would probably help—it made her relive the dream over and over again.

So when he said "_Legilimens!_" this time, the blue light erupted around her unintentionally, throwing Tenzin back. When they both recovered, he'd insisted she did it on purpose.

"I don't want to talk to that thing!" she'd said.

He'd looked perplexed at that (he didn't understand that the blue magic felt alive, somehow), and she'd shaken her head, storming off into the woods of Massachusetts.

She walked, and walked. After what may have been a few minutes or a few hours, she began to wonder when Tenzin would come looking for her. She didn't mind, though. Maybe he decided to let her go.

Korra knew she would be back, eventually, anyway.

But then she noticed that the forest began to blur around her, becoming hazy at the edges. Like a dream. It didn't feel like one, though, and she surreptitiously pinched herself to make sure.

Pausing, feeling her heart begin to pound, she stopped, wishing she hadn't left Tenzin. She didn't understand all the specifics, but she knew he was protecting her from the scary people and maybe other people, too. After overhearing an argument between him and Katara one night, she'd learned that he had a family, too, somewhere, and that he'd left them to come help.

She just got so frustrated with him and his big bald head and pointy beard, acting like it should be easy for her to control the blue magic. No matter how many times he told her that her own safety depended on controlling it, she still couldn't just randomly do it. He didn't understand that.

Around her the trees blurred and wavered, and she felt an immense presence behind her. The air stopped in her throat and she was pretty sure she gasped, but she wasn't sure, and when she turned around it was there.

The blue pillar of light that haunted her dreams.

"No!" she screamed, but just like in the dreams she felt herself drawn to it. It was whispering things again, things she couldn't understand. And suddenly she wanted to understand, she wanted to touch her hand to it, to talk to it. And even if it did bring her back to the dark place, at least, maybe, it would stop. (Even if she was so, so scared.)

This time, though, when she placed her hand to it, nothing happened at first. She'd closed her eyes in preparation, but when she opened them it was just her hand thrust into the blue light, tingling with a strange warmth. But then she looked closer and saw something shadowy. For a second, she thought it was her own shadow, somehow, but then whatever it was came nearer.

It was another girl, looking confused and frightened. She had long dark hair held up by a pretty flower and green, green eyes, and she was wearing a muggle school uniform.

And she was looking right at Korra, through that blue light, her own hand held into it.

"Is this a dream?" the girl said, and the tremor in her voice made Korra want to be brave, to say that this was no dream, and that there was nothing to be scared of. That she had lived with the blue light for a long time.

But Korra was scared. (So, so scared.)

So she said instead, "I don't know." Because she didn't know, really, if this was real. Korra was starting to worry she would need to be sent away to a hospital for wizards and witches who couldn't tell the difference between real and not-real anymore.

"Oh." The girl's voice was very soft. In the blue light, everything became still, soft. Korra wasn't sure if it was always like this in her dreams. Then, reaching forward, the girl touched Korra's hand. Korra jerked backward, startled. "Oh!" the girl said again, but this time her voice was sharp, energetic, and her eyes got a focused look about them, like the look Tenzin got when he was trying to figure out a new spell to try. "Can I…?"

Korra was scared. She felt like the darkness was waiting somewhere, that she would fall again, and so she nodded, hoping if she did start to fall, maybe holding onto someone would stop it. The other girl reached forward more slowly and placed their palms together. Around them, the blue light pulsed slightly. Korra could no longer see the forest. She had no idea where she was anymore, and the thought made her grab the other girl's hand.

"I've had dreams like this before," the other girl said, "but never like this. It's…less scary this time."

Dumbstruck, Korra looked intently into her eyes. (She decided, somewhere in her mind, that they were pleasantly interesting eyes.) "You've had dreams about the blue ma-…blue light too?" She hadn't thought there were any muggles left who remembered the tear.

"Well, sort of. It's always just…kind of in the background," she said, and now she was looking around them with interest. Korra felt a bit angry that she didn't seem to be scared now, and that she didn't have to live with the not-memories of Korra's dreams.

"In mine, I always end up dying," Korra said. She knew Tenzin would have been angry at that because it was too close of a hint to who she was (_the girl who died_), but this girl was a muggle. Korra decided it was probably safe. "The blue light sucks me in and I die."

She felt a bit of satisfaction as the other girl's eyes widened in fear at that, and then a strange little warmth as she clutched her hand tighter. But then the satisfaction left because there was really no point in scaring her. She knew her mother would have been scolding her for being mean. "It looks like we're going to be okay, though," Korra said consolingly. "I mean, usually by this point it's over."

At that, the dark-haired girl relaxed and began investigating again. Experimentally, she poked her free hand through the light. It seemed to disappear, and she looked thoughtful. "I wonder what happens if we try to step out?"

"No!" Korra said, and it was the same fear that first took over when she saw the pillar of light in the forest. The other girl looked a bit startled at her outburst. "Uh…I'm usually alone in my dreams." Not to mention, who knew what might be out there?

But the girl suddenly looked away, her eyes narrowed in focus again. "I think I hear something…" She turned, and her free hand vanished out of the light again. "I think my dad is calling for me."

"No, wait!" Korra shouted, but the girl merely squeezed her hand one more time.

"It's okay," she said with a smile over her shoulder. "You're not alone."

And then the girl was gone, and the blue light vanished, and Korra was somehow back at the house with Tenzin's big head hovering over her.

"You're awake!" he exclaimed, and he seemed relieved.

Groaning, she sat up, feeling like she did the one time she dared a boy back home to an eating contest. "Huh?"

Tenzin fluttered about her in a way that reminded her of the tiny birds that sang in the trees, and she sat numbly as he arranged pillows behind her to prop her up. "You were unconscious for some time."

"How did you find me?" she mumbled.

"Find you?" He looked concerned and tried to feel her forehead—some muggle way for checking for fever, Korra vaguely remembered Katara saying—and she didn't have the energy to push it away.

"In the woods."

He paused, then, and lifted his hand away, and his eyebrows did that _thing_ where they lowered and seemed to get really thick and dark, like the time she accidentally blew a tree out of the ground and knocked in a wall of the house. Except this time Korra didn't feel like laughing at his expression. "What?" she said, shifting and noticing that she felt kind of achy in her muscles.

"Korra," he said slowly, and he was looking at her in a way that made her skin prickle in unease. "Korra, you weren't in the woods. When I tried to use Legilimency on you, you used blue magic and collapsed. I carried you in here. You've been asleep for several hours."

So it _was_ all a dream? But it had felt real. Her head began to hurt. Was the other girl a figment of her imagination too? Were the people with blank faces haunting her dreams fake too?

"But…I saw the blue light again." She didn't mention that she also saw another person. It felt private, somehow, that tiny moment with the other girl, holding hands in the eerie quiet of endless blue. _You're not alone_. Desperately, Korra wanted to believe that—Korra, who had somehow saved the world. Korra, who had to flee her home to stay safe. Korra, who felt the burden of _The Boy Who Lived_ in her mind.

She wondered what Harry Potter had felt when he found out who he was. She wondered if, maybe, he felt alone, too. They'd said he had great friends, though, and she felt jealous at that. Jealous that the other girl had been close, but that maybe it wasn't real, that maybe it was just something she made up in the lonely hidden parts of her brain. The same parts, maybe, where the blue magic lived and waited.

He sat on the bed next to her, his eyebrows lifting a little. She groaned and pulled the blanket over her head, knowing already from his expression that he would try to have some sort of sensitive chat with her.

"Korra, you've been dreaming about the tear for several weeks, now." When he paused, she grunted half-heartedly to show she was listening. Not that she had a choice. "I think we need to find the root of the problem, maybe try to uncover the memories that you can't access. Whatever it is is obviously taking its toll on you. Perhaps a pensieve—"

She had a vague memory of the word "pensieve," but forgot what it meant. "I'm tired," she cut him off, and, suddenly, it was true. She felt her eyelids drooping against the darkness under the blankets. For a long moment, Tenzin stayed still, and she could practically feel his gaze through the comforter. Then he surprised her by patting her side.

"Rest, Korra," he said, hovering, before she heard his surprisingly light footsteps make their way out of the room.

* * *

_You're not alone._

A ghostly hand closed over hers—she knew, this time, that it wasn't real, but somehow she could still feel it.

So when Tenzin cast "_Stupefy!_" and the blue magic erupted in her veins, whispered in her mind, she didn't feel afraid. She held onto that ghostly image of the hand, and instead of sinking into darkness, instead of trying to throw all of the blue magic out of her in fear that it would consume her, she listened.

_You're not alone_.

She wasn't sure if that was really what the blue magic was saying, but it was easiest, safest. Letting it roll through her like water instead of like lightening, she felt it yawn and retreat to its place in the back of her mind. Then it was quiet.

Breathing out slowly, she opened her eyes (she didn't realize they were closed) and saw Tenzin looking at her in surprise. It was kind of funny, with his eyes all round and his bushy eyebrows arched halfway up his forehead, but she didn't really feel like laughing. She'd made the blue magic go back to sleep, but she wasn't sure if that was what she wanted. She wasn't sure if she wanted it to stay, and yet, wasn't sure if she wanted it to stay asleep, either.

Wanting to avoid sensitive chats, though, and touching the part of her that really was rather proud she'd finally stopped herself from doing the magic bomb thing, she grinned and put her hands on her hips. "Guess we won't need to do Legil…Leg…the mind-reading thing anymore."

"Perhaps," he said slowly. "But we'll still need to know what happened, exactly. One way or another." When she scrunched her face up and got ready to argue, though, he held up his hand. "For now, we'll take a break. Well done, Korra." He actually smiled a little at her, and she decided that maybe he wasn't as annoying as she thought.


	4. Chapter 4

_A/N: Well, I should be doing work on my final papers, but I wrote fanfiction instead. Oops. Here's a slightly shorter chapter. I have more that needs to be edited/expanded on, but I'm going to hold off on updating until I get more of my real life work done. Also, adding anything more to this chapter wouldn't have made sense where I stopped it._

* * *

The year passed quickly, filled with exhausting sessions where she learned to control the blue magic so she could go places. A few times, they visited Boston and New York for the day, and she suspected that the trips Katara's influence. Eventually, Katara left for Canada, and she'd hugged Korra with a long, lingering touch that didn't quite reach her eyes.

(Korra wouldn't understand that look for many years.)

And, the whole time, the repeating memory, now fading: _You're not alone_. Green eyes, a hand touching hers. Knowing that they had somehow found each other, real or not, in the blue magic had made it easier to accept as maybe not so scary. Knowing she might not have been alone in it helped, too.

Korra found herself across the table from her parents at a muggle restaurant in Anchorage. Outside, the dusky Alaskan sky rang with notes of summer, only a faint smattering of stars visible in the halflight from the light of the city. She stared at it more than at her parents, fascinated, as always, by the magic of Alaska, by the comforting feeling of its embrace. She sometimes thought the muggles could feel it too, here in the far reaches of the world. It was more common for wizards and witches to pass through muggle places, anyway.

This was the eighth time she had gone home to visit her parents. It took several months before Tenzin had determined no one was looking for her in the large city, and the dreams of the blank-faced men had made Korra glad to stay away even if she missed home.

She continued to study the sky, not wanting to look at her mom or dad, not wanting to see the lines their faces made as they tried to smile but failed.

"Are you excited to be starting school, Korra?" her mom asked, probing, and Korra continued looking outside because she knew her mom wanted to look at her. Regardless of where Korra wanted to look, knowing her mom expected her to do something made her avoid doing it at all costs.

"Yeah," Korra said noncommittally, trying to hide the flush of emotions that rose up in her throat every time she thought about school.

While she had been excited at first, the closer it got, the more she felt her stomach clench at the thought. What if there was no one she could be friends with? She'd seen enough of New York and Massachusetts to have a rough assumption of what sorts of lives her classmates would've had. Their lives wouldn't have been lived in the borderland between magic and muggle, like hers; theirs wouldn't have involved a frightening blue light whispering in the back of the mind; theirs would have been lived peacefully in quaint houses with white fences.

(Korra never understood the pride some people, magical or muggle, took in the ownership of their land. She never understood fences.)

Korra wasn't sure she wanted to fit in at school.

She often wondered about her dad's parents, what they were like, how they had lived—she knew that, as Yupiit, they probably knew ways of surviving off the land. Her parents didn't speak much of it (she knew from overheard conversations that there had been some sort of argument), but she often imagined it in her mind—not having to depend on owls for food deliveries, not having to live with Tenzin to stay protected. Just her, and the land, and her grandparents. Some part of her understood they had been gone, or _dead_ but she didn't like that word anymore, for a long time, since before the tear. It didn't feel like it to her, though. In her dreams, when they were not haunted by endless blue, she saw their wrinkled foreheads, heard their voices. They called her _Uterneq_. She'd asked her parents about that, once, but their faces had made lines again and she'd stopped.

When Korra looked out at the sky, sometimes she imagined she could touch the horizon and find them there.

"Korra," Tenzin sighed next to her. Caught. She reluctantly returned her attention back to the table.

No matter where she was or what she was doing, she spent a lot of time thinking about being anywhere besides where she was. In the back of her mind, the blue magic hummed, sleeping fitfully.

Suddenly, her dad's hand was covering her own on the table. She looked up and he was giving her a soft look, one she hadn't seen since before…

_Blue light, swallowing her. Darkness._

"I bet you'll be one heck of a quodpot player," he said, and she could see a light in his eyes that looked a little like the starlight outside, like the horizon, like kind hands brushing her hair from her face. _"Uterneq_._"_ It banished the dark memory of the tear from her mind.

"Tonraq!" her mom said angrily, but Korra knew she wasn't really angry because the lines on her face smoothed out and she thought she saw a light in her eyes, too.

The thought of the sport made her feel happy for the first time in a while since her mom had never let her play it, thinking it was too dangerous. (Her dad always snuck in some practice flying, though, and she cherished the memories of the two of them weightless in the air, tossing a plain ball through the night.) "I hope they have tryouts right away," she said.

(Korra would find out, years later, that Senna had known about the late night flying sessions all along despite Tonraq's best efforts at subterfuge.)

Later that night, they stepped out of the restaurant into the smell of metal and concrete. Korra never really enjoyed cities, but she was fascinated by the energy and warmth of them all the same. As they walked the streets, preparing to turn down a hidden alley, she heard a noise. Out of the corner of her eye, she swore blue lit up a brick wall, and she immediately turned and dashed toward it, remember what happened the last time she saw the blue light.

_"You're not alone."_

But instead, when she reached the dumpster, panting, her parents and Tenzin yelling at her from behind, she found a small, dirty, white form.

A puppy.

Neither Senna, Tonraq, nor Tenzin could convince Korra to leave it behind or bring it to a muggle shelter.

"Naga," Korra said, looking into the brown eyes, and she knew the dog could understand her. "Naga."

Behind her, her mother sighed. "Look at its paws. It's going to be huge."

Korra just hugged the puppy to her tighter.

"You're not alone," she whispered to Naga.

"Well," Tenzin said slowly, "she will need an animal with her at school."

And that was that.

* * *

Asami was alone. She shuffled from her home, to school, then at the end of the day, she waited inside with the overly-nice guidance counselor for her father's chauffeur to pick her up.

"I'm not taking any chances," he'd said when she'd asked him about it.

She didn't know why, but she suspected it had something to with her mother, something to do with the way her father never really told her what had happened to her. But some part of Asami remembered—some part of Asami knew the blue light was real.

A year passed since her strange encounter with the other girl in the blue light. Sometimes, at night, she could still feel the warm press of the other girl's hand against hers. It was the first time she'd touched anyone other than her father as far back as she could remember. Everyone seemed to keep their distance, as if afraid she would break under the slightest pressure.

Asami wanted to tell them she was strong. Asami wanted to tell them that no one else could bear the lonely days, the frightening nights. But Asami held it in, if only for her father's sake. He thought the dreams had stopped a year ago (she stopped mentioning them after she met the girl in the blue light).

Her life, then, became a perpetual cycle of endless, repetitive days.

So she studied, and read, and invented, and had tested out of the 7th grade after the first quarter, just as she'd tested out of 5th grade years before. The 8th graders had given her trouble, the first day, but when she'd accidentally let it slip to her father, an angry phone call later switched her to another class.

Now, though, it was summer, and she was about to start high school as probably the only 12-year-old to ever have set foot on the academy's campus. She spent the summer reading ahead for her engineering courses.

The academy was a special school for technology and engineering in Westchester, not too far from the city or from her home. Thankfully, she had been accepted into the academy without her father's help initially, so she at least knew she was there on her own merits. Not that the other students would think so, though. They'd see her name, _Asami Sato_, and instead they'd see, _Future Industries._ Instead of her face, they'd see _Hiroshi Sato_, Japanese millionaire and rising tech and engineering mogul with a hand in everything from civil engineering to car manufacturing to electronics.

Asami knew these things.

Asami knew she would stay alone.

The truth was, she didn't mind it too much. Her father was fairly busy and, since she was old enough to look after herself, she could spend her days researching on her own. When Asami was younger, her father had hired various tutors for over the summer, but he soon realized that she worked best on her own, in peace, where she could gather her thoughts in her mind before working them out on paper.

Still…

_The young girl, brown skin, bright blue eyes that nearly matched the blue light around them. Her clothes a bit worn and a little...off, somehow—the t-shirt a little too baggy, the jeans ripped in ways that didn't seem intentional. But still, her eyes, her face, determined and set and suspicious, at first, until Asami had reached out._

_And she'd reached back, amazed, frightened, and Asami knew she wasn't the only one with a fear of the blue light. She wasn't the only one who went to sleep afraid, unsure of what would happen there. Asami wanted to comfort the girl, then, to tell her it was ok—and then a voice, softly, far away, like it was underwater calling to her, and it was her father. So she'd said, "You're not alone," and that was the best comfort she could give and she'd seen the words reflected on the girl's face, in her eyes, which lit up before drowning in fear as Asami stepped out of the light and into her bed, suddenly lying down, her father standing over her._

_She didn't know how she got there, really. Her last memory had been of her running out the door in protest, angry at him for planning a business trip during time they'd put aside for a vacation._

_And then she'd found the blue light waiting at the end of the road, and the girl, and then she somehow ended up back in her bed._

Asami knew it hadn't been a dream the same way she knew the dreams of her mother weren't, either.

She wished she could see the girl again. Ever since then, she'd gone to sleep feeling hopeful rather than frightened, even when she had the bad dreams of her mother. Somehow, the blue light seemed comforting now, drowning out the green and the terror and even the harsh angles of her father's face.

It made her feel…unhappy to be alone, for once. Dissatisfied. And for Asami, that was dangerous.


	5. Chapter 5

_A/N: I'm so sorry for the delay. I had a bit of a crisis, but, well, here we are, with a long chapter to make up for it. I've had a lot of this sitting in a word document for a while. I was really tempted to just hit delete and write this part over, but I didn't in the interest of actually updating. Updates should come faster; the plot's coming together more now. I hope you find it interesting. I know it might feel like a lot of exposition, but trust me, there's a lot going on if you spot the clues!_

* * *

Not long after dinner with her parents, Korra and Tenzin traveled back to Massachusetts. The trips back to the Northeast were long, with Tenzin muttering something about the Floo Networks being potentially unsafe and muggle transportation being expensive. They traveled by a magical bus system through all of Canada, cutting a diagonal line across miles and miles of land that whipped by in a blur. Korra liked looking out at it. It was peaceful.

When they pulled into New York, though, the bus materializing in an alley with a horrific, magical squeal, Tenzin told her they'd be getting off a stop early. Korra hopped off excitedly and little Naga stumbled after her. Usually they went straight back to Massachusetts, but today Tenzin said they'd shopping for her school books and clothes and her wand and whatever else a young witch needed. A pouch hung from Tenzin's belt, swaying enticingly, and she tried to decide if there was a way to maybe sneak a sickle for something sweet. It was her money, after all—or, at least, her parents'.

The thought dampened her joy a little bit as they wandered onto 5th Ave. She wished her parents could be there, but she knew that if anyone recognized them (she still didn't understand how they could—did her parents ever leave Alaska?) they would all be in danger. Or at least that's what Tenzin kept saying. Nobody knew what Korra looked like except that one blurry picture in the newspaper, but her parents might have given her away.

She wondered, suddenly, if anybody knew what Tenzin looked like and why he seemed to be the exception to all these rules.

Immediately, though, she lost her train of thought as a building began to materialize in between two fancy-looking muggle shops. People in nice clothes moved so fast Korra could feel a wake of wind trail behind them. A few people smiled at Naga, who gave an excited "yip." No one seemed to notice the suddenly-appearing building, nor her dirty sneakers or t-shirt. She'd been on 5th Ave once or twice before, but only for a moment before traveling by muggle transportation to the Head Patroller. (Toph still scared her, a little, but she was also so _cool_ that Korra looked forward to their visits with a mix of anxiety and anticipation.)

Tenzin ushered her inside the blank storefront with a backward glance over his shoulder.

When she stepped over the threshold, Korra's mind lit up.

* * *

It took them much longer than Tenzin had anticipated to find her a wand. She could tell by the way he pulled on his beard and fidgeted against the wall, occasionally chastising Naga for trying to dig through various boxes.

Around them, small lights hovered in the air, fluttering like little bugs. Korra, for once in her life, didn't feel impatient or bored, didn't wish desperately to be anywhere else. Instead, she was entirely captivated as they went through different wands.

The first one had exploded in blue light.

Literally exploded.

Tenzin had hastily cast _protego_ when the wood pieces went flying around the room, and Naga cowered behind the front desk. The wandmaker hadn't flinched, though, merely laughing in a way that sort of frightened her as he pulled another one down.

"Great, great!" He'd yelled, pulling down more boxes and only growing more delighted as they variously fizzed, buzzed, exploded, burst into flames, or shattered.

She'd felt self-conscious at first, not understanding why he was so excited she was destroying his hard work, and she could tell Tenzin had at first been wary, unsure of what the man—_Varrick—_might have been able to figure out her identity.

But he seemed fun and harmless and he had a similar skin tone to her, and she wondered if maybe he was Yupik too, or maybe Inupiat, or…

"Aha!" he said, drawing her thoughts into the present as she gave the newest wand an enthusiastic flick. A bright blue light emerged from the end, coiling through the air before disappearing in a dazzle of sparkles.

She looked at the wand in amazement. The blue magic sang softly in her mind, but it wasn't asleep, and it wasn't overwhelming, either. The wand seemed to calm it. The wood was only a few shades darker than her palm, and she folded it tightly in her fingers. Unexpectedly, a deep, comforting warmth stole over her, and she _knew_.

Varrick clapped his palms together in delight. The motion made the wide sleeves of his blue robes billow out dramatically.

"Wandmaking," he said with a flourish, his mustache seeming to twitch, "is an art of the greatest subtlety and talent." He drew himself up and thrust a finger toward his head. "And a matter of _genius_. Only a brilliant designer like me could have brought the three essential parts of wandmaking together to make such a perfect vessel for one with such talent! Length: 11 inches. And a rare wood, too: holly. Yes, curious…" For a moment, Varrick's bravado seemed to falter and his right eyebrow twitched. He tapped his rather large chin. "Hm…"

Korra glanced at Tenzin, whose eyebrows were doing that _thing_ again, drawing low across his brow so that his blue eyes were entirely shadowed. She felt the warm comfort fade a little as she looked at the wand. Was there something wrong with holly that she didn't know about?

But then Varrick began yelling again, and she had no room inside her head for any thoughts other than his loud words. "Great core, too! Yes, great core. Dragon heartstring. Not very popular here in the States, you know—they don't let dragon ingredients in much. Too volatile. Especially after that nasty business up north." He leaned forward and whispered loudly behind his hand: "But a wizard has his ways, you know? Nothing can stop art!"

After paying, they made their way out of the shop, Naga sniffing at the new item in Korra's hand curiously.

"Don't forget to visit my other stores!" Varrick called after them. "I'm quite the entrepreneur, you know. Genius knows no limits! There's _Varrick's Magical Miscellany_, for every need for every witch and wizard—and _Nuktuk's Noodle Emporium_—"

Korra hastily tucked her wand away as they stepped out onto 5th Ave again, the sky significantly darker. Instinctively looking up at the wide, dark expanse, she only saw the hazy glow of the city lights rather than the bright, moving bands of green and blue she was used to at home. She paused as Tenzin glanced at her list from the school, inhaling the odd mix of smells that seemed ever-present in the city. Under her t-shirt, the wand seemed warm against her, a pocket of comfort in the vast and sprawling city. The tall buildings made her feel choked in and crowded.

With her wand, though, she found as they made their way to the book store, she didn't have to concentrate so hard to keep the blue magic in the back of her mind.

_"You're not alone."_

Still, she felt she would always need that memory, that touch felt in the lonely blue light, especially when she slept. Under the memory's power, the dreams became less scary, and she now woke before the final, terrifying darkness of her own death. It still frightened her, though, and she still had flashes of the moment randomly during the day, making the blue threaten at the edges of her mind. But at least she wasn't alone.

Naga yelped in excitement, playing with the laces on Korra's shoes. She felt herself smile.

No, not alone anymore.

* * *

The first time she saw the mountains surrounding the New York School for the Study of Magic, she felt like she was home. Not home like Alaska—nowhere could rival the limitless possibility hidden in the endless horizon of her home state—but home like she belonged. The rolling mountains and the pine trees of the Adirondacks came close to her home state. She'd watched the hills grow taller and taller as they whipped by the windows of the train, the crowded skyline of the city fading into rows of neat houses and then finally open fields.

Despite her fears, the school didn't seem as uniform as the rest of the northeast. No one knew she was The Girl Who Died here (and every time someone had called her that, it scared her, really). She could just be Korra. It was her favorite thing about magic. No matter where you came from, or what happened to you as a kid, all that mattered was that you were magic. That you felt that hum in your veins and that the wand answered its call for you. She thought specifically of her new friends, Mako and Bolin. Bolin was in her year but Mako was a year ahead. They grew up as orphans, spending a lot of time in the foster system in the city and on Long Island before they got their letters.

Almost no one at the school looked like her, but sometimes she was able to forget about that with her friends.

Together, they weren't orphans or girls who died and saved the world—they were just students. Mako, Bolin, and Korra.

Loud, brash, reckless Korra, according to her teachers, who often had to clean up after some mess she made or another. They usually blamed the unruly dragon heartstring in her wand for the unrelenting and sometimes uncontrollable power of her spells, but Korra knew it had something to do with the blue magic, too, which seemed only too happy to be let loose.

The three of them spent their first months together exploring the school. At first, its cool, brick exterior had seemed cold and uninviting to her. Now, though, she looked on the collection of buildings with fondness, even if some part of her still missed the scattered organization of her home city. (Or, if she was honest, a small house hidden in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.)

Soon the three were inseparable. When they learned about Harry Potter in History of Magic, she decided the three of them were like Harry, Ron, and Hermione. She began to wait for some sort of exciting adventure to happen, some sort of problem to solve, some daring rescue to make where they'd be tested based on wit and bravery.

When nothing happened, she got restless, until one day she saw a poster hanging on the wall.

_ARE YOU BRAVE?_

_DO YOU WANT ADVENTURE?_

_DRAMA?_

_EXCITEMENT?_

_THEN QUODPOT IS FOR YOU!_

_TRY-OUTS SATURDAY, 10:00 AM_

Grinning, Korra ran to find Bolin. She knew he was obsessed with quodpot and followed the United States national teams. He wasn't a bad flyer in flying class, maneuvering with a determined sort of force. For Korra, brooms had come to symbolize freedom, and she spent her time in class practicing hairpin turns and dodges.

Mako, on the other hand, had already said he preferred quidditch, and that American attempts at either the original sport or its more explosive spin-off were pitiful.

_"Flying is an art,"_ he'd said, with his sharp eyebrows drawn together.

She figured Mako needed to loosen up and have more fun. No twelve-year-old should've been that cranky.

* * *

Asami didn't want to be alone anymore. Some part of her wished, some tiny, desperate part, that she'd never stepped into that blue light humming in the corner, that she hadn't raised her hand and _touched_ someone for the first time in who knows how long.

Because as much as she had her books, and her equations, and her brilliance burning with energy at the corners of her mind, she felt a gap where that touch still lingered in her memory, or her dreams. She didn't know if it's real or not.

Asami was smart enough to decide it doesn't matter, and that was dangerous.

At school, then, she walked the hallways open, hesitant, ready to pull closed again, seeking some connection in the sterile bricks of the Institute. Her father sent her here to find other students like her, and then to outshine them.

Asami quickly learned there was no one exactly like her.

There were other child prodigies, some even younger than Asami, small with eyes wide enough to take in the whole world and spit it back out in numbers and letters. There were other rich students, sons and daughters of famous CEOs and inventors and politicians and leaders. There were other children who had felt devastating loss, and there were other students who were from or whose parents were from Japan.

No one else, though, had felt the blue, or seen the green pierce their mother in their dreams every night.

One day, wandering through the courtyard and admiring the elaborate metal sculptures, she found an older boy leaning against one. He had a sketchbook open and seemed to be drawing various buildings.

Curious, Asami sidled closer, trying to look at his designs. She'd developed a passing interest in Future Industries' own buildings in the past few months. She hesitated just at the edge of the grass, her heels pressed into the sidewalk and the toes of her shoes teasing the dirt.

"It's alright," he spoke suddenly. She jumped back onto the sidewalk. "You can come look if you want." He glanced up and smiled, tilting his sketchbook toward her. Hesitantly, she inched forward.

The designs were like nothing she'd seen before—metal buildings curled in on themselves protectively like shells, elegant and economical at once. The boy had scrawled equations under a few of the sketches, testing for efficiency.

"I'm Bataar," he said, and the way the name left his lips it was like there was a gap hesitating, just at the end, his voice pitched up as though expecting to say more but he'd cut himself off.

After a life time of having things kept from her, it made Asami wary, but she was interested in his designs.

"Asami," she said, and he smiled at her like he'd known her name all along.

* * *

They developed a strange companionship. Older and more advanced in the engineering track, he took it upon himself to show her some more advanced equations and theories during study halls. She learned the buildings he'd sketched were actually designed by his father, and again, the curious gap at the end of his sentence, as if there were more to say and he wasn't.

The gaps made her uneasy, and she tried to tell herself it was only because of what she saw in her father's eyes every time her mother was brought up, and tried to tell herself not everyone who had something to hide was hiding something dark and piercing green. But the piercing green of his eyes reminded her of that light, and she could never quite shake the feeling of uncertainty around him.

Still, she longed for the brief companionship of the blue light, and this was as close as she was going to get. So she watched, and waited, and curled in on herself except for the equations. Every time she solved one correctly, Bataar brightened, excited, growing more enthusiastic with each day.

There was something overly calculated in his excitement, in his green eyes, piercing her, but Asami tried not to think about that.

Occasionally, they were joined by some of Baatar's friends, but they were a rotating cast of faces that Asami never quite remembered. They never seemed to stick around for very long, seeming to feed off of Baatar's brilliant energy before retreating to their own homework and exams.

Eventually, Bataar asked if she would come with him to somewhere outside of school.

She hesitated. "My father doesn't want me leaving," she said, retreating into her formality like the metal shell of Bataar's father's buildings.

But Bataar looked at her, and there, the piercing interest seeing right into her brain. "My father doesn't want me doing a lot of things, but eventually, you have to decide to be your own person. Make your own choices." The sunlight hit his glasses in such a way that they reflected, hiding his eyes, and maybe it was that momentary cover that made Asami change her mind.

"Okay," she said, and she realized it was the first time she was doing something without her father's permission. A wild excitement erupted in her chest, and she felt that maybe, this would help her start being free of the dreams and the light, that maybe she wouldn't need that moment in blue anymore.

They walked across campus. It was a breezy Saturday in November, and she could feel the hint of distant winter on the wind. Her father had let her come to campus in order to study. She hadn't really told him about studying with Baatar, but her extra sessions in the library had made her current courses extremely easy, as was reflected in her grades, and her father didn't question her study habits. She'd only need to call her driver when she was done.

As they approached the front entrance, she saw a gray car idling. Baatar waved at it and a woman unfurled herself from the driver's seat.

Then Asami saw her eyes.

They were a darker green than Baatar's, shadowed by something haunted, something old and wise and mature that seemed out of place on a teeanger's face. She wore a long green shirt that highlighted her eyes, and strips of gray along her shoulders reminded Asami of some sort of military uniform.

She felt immediately uneasy, but then the girl's face transformed into a smile when Baatar approached, and Asami told herself that no one who smiled like that, or kissed someone like that, could possibly be too bad.

Baatar turned to her. "Asami, this is Kuvira. Kuvira, this is Asami Sato." Asami walked forward and felt her right hand locked in a firm grasp.

"Asami," Kuvira said, and her voice was low, and the shadow lifted from her eyes long enough to pierce her, just like Baatar's.

"Hi," she said quietly, and Asami felt an energy radiating off this woman that contrasted with Baatar's excited brilliance. Kuvira's was cold and hot all at once.

"Come on," Baatar said, taking Asami by the shoulders. "We're going to take you somewhere you'll find interesting."

A bubble of nervousness welled within her but she stamped it down, telling herself that she'd known Baatar for months and spent time alone with him and nothing bad had happened. Still, she couldn't help but glance at Kuvira and see her shadowed eyes, and she heard her father's voice echo in her head:

_There are many people who would hurt you to get to me._

But she also remembered, _You are not alone_, and these two strange people, with all their intensity, were her only lifeline because she couldn't rely on memories that may have been dreams forever. So she got in the car, and Kuvira started the car with Baatar in the front seat.

They drove for some time, with Baatar and Kuvira alternating between quietly talking between themselves and making small-talk with Asami, primarily about school and her study habits. That was, perhaps, one of the reasons she continued to spend time with Baatar—he didn't seem that interested in her family background, and focused entirely on her intellect. Her father always had, too, but Baatar seemed genuinely interested in her ideas and even some of her theories.

Finally, they turned down small road and arrived at a hunched, metal building, not unlike the ones in Baatar's designs. She examined it critically with a budding civil engineer's eye, interested immediately, and thought perhaps that they had taken her here to show her some more designs or maybe to teach her about these strange, defensive buildings.

She climbed out of the car and followed Baatar and Kuvira in. The street was quiet and the building was inset from the road. They spent a few minutes walking toward it, and Asami got the distinct impression that no one else was there. Once again, she felt uncertain, but this time, her engineer's mind overpowered her uncertainty, convincing herself that this might help her grow and begin to even maybe make her own designs.

They stepped in, and Asami noted that the building seemed unfinished. It was still mostly empty, and she examined the high, gray ceiling above her curiously. She wondered how they had constructed it without more support beams—running through various calculations in her head, she confirmed that it should be impossible. Perhaps they had made a lighter metal alloy than it appeared to be? Perhaps, too, there were support structures simply hidden in the high shadows.

But something felt eerie to Asami, and she half-expected to turn and find the blue light hovering in the corner. Turning quickly, she saw nothing there.

"It's alright," Baatar said, laying a hand on her shoulder. "My father's company is in the process of outfitting several buildings like this one. There's no one here but us, and there's nothing to be afraid of." Then he and Kuvira shared a look, and there was something there, some uncertainty in Kuvira's face that made Asami pause. They made frantic hand gestures to one another before Baatar said, "Hang on, Asami. Kuvira and I are just going to check the latest...electrical upgrades." Again, the hesitation in his voice. When he and Kuvira walked away and began whispering heatedly, Asami surreptitiously inched forward. She cast a quick glance around the building and figured it was shaped in a way that the sound should bounce off the curved metal to the far wall. She shuffled over, pretending to examine the walls, when Kuvira's low, intense voice floated to her:

"Baatar, I'm still not sure this is a good idea. I could get expelled—"

"We've been over this!" Baatar's voice, anxious now, cracking a little on the last word. "You're over seventeen, so you don't have the Trace, and this building is our best cover. We need her. And things have been different—they haven't been able to keep track. We know from grandmother that there are still so many out there who know—"

A loud sigh cut him off. "Fine, Baatar. But it's on you if it goes wrong." There was a coldness there, and it frightened Asami. She felt a chilled silence from Baatar as well.

After a heavy moment, with her hand trembling against the cold wall, wishing now for that warm palm and the frightened blue eyes and the blue blue light, footsteps started toward her.

"Asami," a voice beckoned, and it was loud and commanding and for some reason she couldn't avoid it. She knew, too, she couldn't simply stand there with her hand against the wall.

So she turned to face Kuvira. Kuvira was holding…a stick? But she wasn't looking at Asami; her green eyes and her stick were fixed on Baatar, who stood tall and proud and looked into Kuvira's eyes the same way her mother had stared into the green light.

Then:

"_Stupefy!_"


	6. Chapter 6

_A/N: I'm helping my brother move this weekend, so I'm putting this up a bit unpolished so that I can begin working on what comes next. I'm not entirely happy with my prose here, but que sera sera. For those who don't know, "quodpot" is the American version of quidditch (the main international Wizarding sport), but, like with soccer (or football, as the rest of the word calls it), Americans play quidditch but aren't great at it and like quodpot better. Like quidditch, quodpot is played on flying brooms. There aren't many rules outlined for it in the HP universe, so I'm doing some worldbuilding, here. The only rules given are, basically, that quodpot involves trying to get a ball, the quod, into a cauldron with a solution in it that will prevent the ball from exploding. If you're holding the quod when it explodes, you're out._

_If you have any questions, please feel free to go to my tumblr (same username) and I'll answer what I can without giving too much away. (It's kind of hard to keep track of messages and notifications here.)_

* * *

"Sometimes I fancy an immense separation, and sometimes, as at present, a direct communication of spirit with you. That will be one of the grandeurs of immortality-there will be no space..."

-John Keats, letter to George Keats, 1818

* * *

Nothing made sense anymore.

"_Stupefy!_"

The careful lines that made Asami's world sensible broke apart as soon as a jet of red, impossible light shot out from the end of the wooden stick and straight into Baatar's chest. His body snapped into an unnatural stiffness and he fell back against the floor, stunned. The structured order of her world, the plans, the designs, the predictable math, broke apart at fault lines that may have always been there.

Everything turned to chaos, and impossibility, and timelessness. After it happened, she remembered Kuvira saying something, but the sentences flew apart before they even formed in Asami's mind.

"We need…brightest minds…order…unity between our people…"

Kuvira spoke for some time about words that didn't make sense—magic, and she swore she heard the words "witch" and "wizard"—but it all drifted into the void as she stood frozen against the wall, thinking maybe if she just didn't move, it all would stop, or go away, or vanish into the depths of her strange not-dreams and the green light.

Seeing that Asami wasn't responding, Kuvira mumbled something else and walked back to Baatar, shot another red light at him, and he stood—stood—after being frozen—that was impossible. But that word had lost all the meaning Asami once placed in it.

Then things dissolved more, because a voice called from outside, friendly and unassuming, and Kuvira had to take her by the arm and they were suddenly underground and then outside by the gray car.

Kuvira began to speak again: "Have to go…Remember…" There was a long pause, and Asami was faintly aware that her whole body was shaking and that, more than anything, she wanted to hide in the back of that gray car and return to a world that made sense. Then there were voices and yelling, and Kuvira drew herself tall before curling in on herself like the metal building.

And she spun, and was gone.

Asami stood for a long moment, confused, before hands were grabbing her and people were shouting things at her.

"Who…parents…school…what did you see?" _What did you see?_

Distantly, she saw Baatar standing with someone, shrugging and shaking his head. His mouth might have said, "No, I don't know who else was here," but she couldn't tell. He might have said, "I was alone when I heard voices," but that didn't make sense. They hadn't been alone. Kuvira had been there.

She opened her mouth to say, "Kuvira," but her throat was stuck closed, full with all the things she had never said in her life—things she had never even let herself think.

_My mother was killed by an impossible green light._

_Baatar was knocked to the ground by an impossible red light._

Then there was a wooden stick in her face, and someone said a word that was almost familiar:

"_Obliviate_."

Oblivion. A forgetting. A nothingness. An afterlife, maybe.

The world slowed around her. A man in long green clothes was staring at her, and she stared back. A bright light lingered between them.

_Remember_.

In moments of loneliness and confusion, Asami would often look for the blue light she saw in her dreams. It seemed to hover, sometimes, in the corners of her vision, but it was usually gone by the time she focused on it. Except for one time, when she'd heard rumors about her father and his business, and she'd turned in her room to find the blue light standing like a guard. That was the day she'd met that other girl in it (or dreamed it), and she'd felt _real_ for the first time in as long as she could remember.

_Remember._

Instinctively, then, she cast her focus to the edges of her peripheral vision, and she saw it. She turned and touched it in a long, slow motion, yells and voices echoing around her like they were underwater.

It would be the last time she would meet the other girl in the blue light.

* * *

Mako sat silently in the stands, rehearsing some 2nd year charm he'd made a big deal out of—maybe _Alohomora_ or something, but Korra had other things to concentrate on. She and a range of other students stood on the quodpot field, a cool October breeze rattling by them. Bolin nervously gestured at several rather large players—6th years, Korra guessed—but she just shrugged in reply. She was more interested in the cauldrons placed at either end of the field, hovering a few feet off the ground and tilted slightly toward the center.

Though she'd practiced with her dad, they never actually played with an exploding ball. She wasn't nervous about trying out, but…

Her hand absent-mindedly rested over the wand in her robes. If the quod exploded, she suddenly realized, there might be no way to turn off the blue magic in time. She had no idea how powerful the explosion would be, and Tenzin was too worried about hurting her (or himself) to try any more powerful spells. Now, she wished she'd tried harder to convince him.

She decided she would simply have to be good enough to avoid having the quod explode.

Korra's thoughts halted as a pair of boys walked onto the field with a large collection of school brooms and a chest.

Wing and Wei brought each of the potential players forward, alternating who went to which side of the field. Korra wasn't in the first round of tryouts, so she had the opportunity to watch, as best she could from the ground, what was happening above her. Bolin gave her a smile somewhere between nervous and cocky as he ran out into the crowd with a school broom clutched in one hand.

"Remember basic rules!" Wing shouted. "There aren't many. No wands. Players knocked off their brooms while carrying the quod are penalized five yards. Players caught holding the quod when it explodes are out. Each team will try to pass it into the bucket for 10 points. Each eliminated player gives the other team 5 points. The game ends when one team reaches 150 points." And then they blew a whistle, and the teams started.

She'd practiced with her dad late at night, under the clear sky and the stars that seemed much more vibrant than they did here in New York, but a full game of quodpot was a messy collection of 22 people frantically passing the ball as quickly as they could down the field rather than a game of precision. Bigger players knocked into smaller ones, trying to unseat them before they could pass the ball up the field. Skilled fliers ducked in and out, carrying the ball forward with quick motions.

The ball passed between players rapidly, the teams evenly matched at first, until a sudden explosion sent Korra backwards, hands over her ears. For a horrifying moment, everything went silent, and all she saw was blue, blue—

_No_, she thought, and might have yelled, and suddenly her wand was in her hand, warm to the touch. Comforting. _You're not alone_. A magic so powerful it nearly _hurt_ swept through her before the wand fought it back to submission, to control, and she sighed. She opened her eyes and glanced hastily around, hoping no one had noticed. She was relieved to see no one seemed to be staring, and she smiled sympathetically at the thin, reedy boy who came floating back toward her clumsily, his hair and eyebrows singed.

(Korra didn't realize that Mako was looking at her from the stands, his brow furrowed.)

"Knocked out first," the boy said in disappointment as he dismounted from his slightly charred broom. Above them, Wing and Wei were whooping excitedly and soon a new ball had the teams back in play.

The rest of the match passed in an anxious blur to Korra, who suddenly began dreading her own tryout. Each time the quod exploded, she had to fight to keep the blue magic from taking over.

Finally, it was her turn. Bolin was standing at the far end of the field and she could faintly see him giving her a thumbs up. She called the broom to her the way her dad taught her, the way the flying instructor taught the first years, and the easy motion calmed her. She was in control. Not the blue magic, not the quod, not the bigger or older kids. After all, she was the Girl Who Died. And if she had died, and come back, somehow, then she could play a game without a ball exploding in her face.

(She hoped.)

So she hopped on the broom and flew straight to the front of her team, Wei hovering next to her, and he grinned. "Brave for a first year, aren't you?" he said, but she could tell he was not much older, himself, and so she simply shot back, "I bet you were, too," and he laughed and someone blew a whistle and a ball dropped from the sky.

Instinctively, she grabbed it and then there were people coming at her, and magic stirred at the edges of her mind but she stopped it. She was flying, finally, for the first time in a year, and the joy seemed to quiet the defensive magic lingering and waiting for something to try to hurt her again.

She dodged upwards and twisted with a yelp. The school broom didn't react as fast as she would like, but that didn't matter to her. She just wanted to fly and feel weightless for the first time since she'd jumped into the blue light. Wei was hovering just below, telling her to pass it before it exploded, but she just grinned.

Korra would be good enough. Good enough that the blue magic wouldn't come back, good enough to join the team, good enough, maybe, to get a broom of her own.

When a larger sixth year came at her, she feinted to the right, then threw all of her weight to the left, flattening herself along the handle. He saw the change but had already begun shifting his weight. Larger and heavier, he couldn't shift back in time to knock her off her broom, but he tried to grab at her. She darted forward and out of his reach and stuck her tongue out at him for good measure.

She felt sure of herself, up here, in the air. Just one player out of many. But she was determined, too, to be the best.

Then the edges of her vision blurred, and she felt her fingertips begin to warm, and her wand heated against her skin.

_No no no,_ she thought, _Not now. There's no danger_.

Her fingertips tingled around the ball clutched under her right arm and she realized the blue magic was, actually, warning her.

Quickly, she turned to a girl from the other team and tossed the ball into her. In reflex, the girl caught it, and then her eyes widened as it began to glow. She tried to toss it away but it turned orange, and bright, and the magic hummed in Korra's fingers.

_No no no no no_

The blue magic would hurt them. They were all too close.

Suddenly Korra wished she was anywhere else. She wished she wasn't a witch, she wished she hadn't come to school, she wished she was still in Massachusetts with Tenzin—or even alone, wandering the woods, away from everyone and everything so no one could get hurt.

Korra didn't want to be alone, though. She wanted to go to class, even if she thought some of them were boring; she wanted to tease Mako and watch his eyebrows get all pointy; she wanted to play quodpot against Bolin; she wanted to reach into the blue magic and find green eyes there and a warm hand, telling her _You're not alone_.

The next thing she knew, she was on the ground, and the light was waiting for her. She reached into it, relieved, thinking maybe some part of her desperate wishing was heard by someone or something.

After a moment, everything faded away. The quodpot pitch melted into green haze and everyone vanished. Blue light surrounded her, and for once, she felt almost comforted by it.

And there was the girl with green eyes, trembling in front of her, her hands reaching forward.

Korra's hands somehow ended up in hers, and somehow she was standing, too, and they were looking at each other in long silence.

The other girl continued to shake, and there were tears, but she was looking at Korra like maybe Korra could fix it, or save her. So Korra said the only thing she could think to say: "You're not alone."

As if the phrase was some sort of spell Korra cast, color returned to the girl's skin and she clutched Korra's hands in her own. They were warm, and damp, and Korra suddenly wished she _could_ fix whatever it was, but there was no daring sacrifice to make this time, no frantic leap to her own death. Just a girl she knew nearly nothing about except that she was brave and probably smart and that she made the blue magic quiet in Korra's mind.

"I'm so scared," the girl said. Her words echoed strangely in the blue light. "There was light—red light—and words—and she turned and was _gone_. How could she do that? That's impossible…it's impossible…"

Korra felt her stomach drop.

She hadn't interacted with many muggles in the last year, but she vaguely remembered, during the years the tear was open, the way muggle news kept talking about things that were "impossible." She remembered the empty, trembling look in muggles' eyes when some magical creature came running down the street, passing through walls or breathing fire or anything else they thought was "impossible."

The girl had seen magic, and was terrified of it.

For the first time, Korra realized what magic could do, could look like. She always knew the blue magic was scary, but she realized, then, that any kind of magic could be scary to the right people. She felt almost ashamed.

"They said something about oblivion," the girl said, casting her eyes around. "Is that what this is? Is it…did I forget?"

Korra had heard the spell enough in her childhood, seen enough muggles react to it, to know what someone had done. Or tried to do.

_Obliviate_. The girl had seen magic, and someone was trying to erase her memory of it.

The word haunted her, sometimes. Korra had heard it screamed in the streets, heard tired voices routinely muttering it over a crowd of muggles. It reminded her of the tear, and of falling into the endless blue, and of dying.

Any kind of magic could be scary to the right people.

"You still remember, though," Korra murmured. "You still remember the mag—the impossible things, right?"

The other girl hesitated. "I don't…I think so. I don't know. It's hard to tell what's real." She looked down at their hands. "I thought this was a dream." Not a nightmare, Korra noticed. Not scary. For some reason, she felt relieved at that. She'd thought of this memory so many times, of the quiet, unquestioning support given, and suddenly it mattered that the other girl had thought of it too. Suddenly it mattered _what_ the girl thought of it.

"I thought it was a dream too."

"Is it?"

"I don't know. Would it matter if it was? I think we're both real, at least." _I think_. The Girl Who Died. Sometimes she felt like her whole life might have been a dream since then. _It's hard to tell what's real._

Then the girl suddenly jerked backward, as if something was grabbing her from behind, her hair blowing in a wind outside the blue. "No!" she shouted, holding tight to Korra's hands. Korra held on and tried to pull the other direction instinctively. She felt her heels dig into a ground she couldn't see. "I think they're coming back. I don't know—I don't—"

Their hands began to slip away, and Korra knew that she couldn't hold on. She let go of one to try to reach into her robe for her wand, but it wasn't there, and she realized she wasn't wearing her school robes; she was wearing the dirty t-shirt and jeans she wore while at Tenzin's.

Realizing they would slip apart, Korra fell back on the only thing she could: "You're not alone. Remember—you're not alone—" _Don't forget me_. And she wasn't sure why that last part mattered, but suddenly it did. It mattered to her that this girl know she wasn't alone in this, in being scared, in being unsure what was real or not, in being dragged away by someone, in being out of control. Korra felt hands on her too, then, and she fought desperately to link their fingers together one last time. "What's your—" _name_—but she was cut off by a distant noise.

The other girl clenched back, her eyes wide and afraid. "I don't want to forget."

An awareness grew in the corners of Korra's eyes, blue and bright, and suddenly the blue pulsed around them, and she felt it in her fingers, and she remembered that this blue light was the blue magic, too, that it had brought them together both times. Whatever it was, it had read their hearts, searching for each other in these dark and lonely moments.

The realization made something in her mind open, and suddenly the blue magic was there, but it wasn't scary. Looking into those green eyes, Korra could only think of it as comforting, secure, something that followed the signs of her own heart. So she let it go, let it travel from her fingertips and over the other girl, and as it passed over her, the green eyes calmed.

"You won't forget," Korra said, and when she spoke the words, it was like a spell, and they shared one last frantic touch before the light vanished and the blue magic left her fingertips. Green eyes faded into darkness. _I don't want to forget_.

She opened her eyes to find Wei hovering over her, a concerned look on his face. "Is that normal?" he asked.

"Is…what normal?" she said, and she realized her throat was dry like she had been screaming, and she was afraid that maybe she had.

"Just…falling over like that," he said, and a flustered looking man bent over her with a wand, poking and prodding. She recognized him vaguely as the school nurse.

She must have passed out, like the last time she'd gone into the blue light—the blue magic—and seen the other girl. She'd woken then to find Tenzin staring at her in concern, but there was a different sort of concern in this man's eyes, but she couldn't quite read what was beneath them.

As she sat up, the nurse backed away. "She seems alright," he said, turning to a woman Korra didn't recognize. "What would you like me to do, Professor Beifong? We can bring her to health services."

"Thanks, Aiwei, but that's all," the woman replied, and Korra looked up into a lined face that reminded her of someone but she couldn't put her finger on it. Her mind wasn't working as fast as usual, and her hand still felt warm from the press of the other girl's palm.

The woman crouched down in front of her. "Korra," she said, smiling, "would you walk with me, please? If you can stand."

Hesitantly, Korra placed her hand in the older woman's, and her mind finally caught up.

_Professor Beifong_.

The headmistress.

_Related to…Toph Beifong?_

As she stood, she spared one last thought for the girl in the light before the headmistress began talking.

"I've heard a lot about you from Tenzin, Korra…"

It was the last time Korra saw the girl in the light, and Korra would spend the next three years wondering if it had been real.

_Don't forget me._


	7. Chapter 7

_A/N: Thanks to the reviews and follows! I've tried incorporating one or two suggestions here. As always, if you have any questions or anything, feel free to find me on tumblr (same user name)._

_The following contains my headcanon for what NYC would be like. I imagine that, especially after an event like the tear, the magical community would get pretty comfortable living alongside the muggle one. Not to mention, weird people walk down the street in the city all the time, so I don't think wizards or witches would have too much trouble blending in, even if their clothes weren't very good._

* * *

"Korra!" he shouted in frustration. "What are you—_Protego!_" A blue bolt of magic bounced off of the shield. "We discussed this! _Expelliarmus!_" The teen's wand flew out of her hand, falling to the ground and rolling away.

Korra merely grinned at her mentor, his bare forehead wrinkled in frustration as she quickly tumbled backward and recovered her wand, neatly avoiding a couple of jinxes sent her way. It should have ended the duel, but she was having too much fun to stop.

"Not my fault you're not as quick as you used to be, old man," she shot at him. "_Stupefy!_" Tenzin efficiently deflected the attack, but she was already moving again, dodging another disarming spell. Korra felt the thrill of the duel wash over her as she rolled forward, her momentum carrying her to her feet and landing her in front of her mentor. Weaving around a nasty-looking hex, she shifted her weight and swung her left leg around, kicking the wand out of his hand. A purple bolt of magic shot out of the end as it spun away.

She held her wand even with him for a moment before whooping in victory and dancing across the grass.

Sighing in exasperation, Tenzin closed his eyes. She knew he was probably counting to ten in his head before speaking.

"Korra," he said again, air exhaling tightly out of his nose in a whistle. "As we have discussed _many_ times, it is imperative that you learn the _proper_ method of magical dueling. The world will need you to know it."

Of course. Sighing, Korra retrieved Tenzin's wand for him and handed it back, as much of a peace offering as she was willing to make. "I don't understand," she said, her eyes narrowing at her mentor. "I mean, I get all the _save the world_ stuff." Sort of. "But I'm so much faster on my feet. It seems so…boring to just stand in one place and shoot spells at each other."

Over the last few years, Korra had learned just a few details from Tenzin about the blue magic and the tear. She knew that there was some group of people, maybe more than one group, working to throw off the careful balance between the muggle world and the wizarding one. Korra remembered hazy details of her home being terrorized by dark magic and dark creatures, and when she'd jumped into the tear, she'd absorbed some of the magic, whatever it was, like Toph said. Her parents had put her into hiding with Tenzin to keep her safe from the people trying to throw everything out of balance.

But there was always something missing at the end of Tenzin's sentences. His stories were always marked by a brief inhale, a tightening of the jaw, and she could still sense that that wasn't all.

_Uterneq._

The young part of her, the part of her that was fourteen and brash and frustrated at being alone all the time, felt like she could take on the faceless men and whoever else was after her. Faint memories of her grandparents, of the love in their eyes, of glances that reminded her of how Tenzin looked at her when she let the blue magic overcome her—faint memories of her grandparents convinced her that there was something more to her. Something that existed before she jumped into the blue light. Before she—

Died.

_Uterneq._

Her mind whispered the word, sometimes. She'd searched for it in the libraries at school, but they didn't have much about Yupik witches and wizards.

Tenzin took his wand from her and she laughed at the obvious exasperation in his face, trying to forget what she'd just been thinking about. She held the few precious memories she had of her grandparents and their people close to her, hidden safely behind walls of blue.

"Besides," Korra continued, "I always have the blue magic if anything really dangerous happens." Ever since that last not-dream, not-memory in the blue light with the muggle girl, she'd begun learning to control it. Really control, it, too—not just beat it into submission with her wand. Something about their hands touching, something about trying to protect her, had made it seem less scary, and she finally understood what Toph had been trying to teach her years ago.

(Except for a few…incidents during quodpot, but Suyin—Headmistress Beifong—knew all about her and the blue light thanks to being Toph's daughter and an old friend of Tenzin's.

She'd told Korra in a whisper, once, that Tenzin had even dated her sister.

The thought of Tenzin being a teenager and dating anyone kind of grossed her out, but she kept that to herself, too.)

Sighing again, her mentor turned and looked at the buildings of her campus. He'd come to visit her and Suyin Beifong here, and she'd challenged him to a duel to show him some new things she and Bolin and Mako had learned at a new dueling club at school. She'd been excited before but now he was getting that _look_ on his face.

"Sometimes I worry that sending you here wasn't the best decision," Tenzin muttered to himself.

And, just like that, he managed to ruin the fun afternoon they were having. "Decision for who?" she countered angrily. "Me? You? The whole wizarding community that apparently depends on me?" The edges of her vision blurred and she clenched her fist around her wand. She tried to count to ten, like Pema taught her, but the school had become a home to her and the thought of leaving made her stomach feel heavy. "Or is it because I'm not just doing everything you say without any explanation at all?" Tenzin turned toward her, his eyebrows already contracting in frustration.

"The people threatening you will not be so understanding, Korra. If you're not learning the safest techniques—"

"You already took one home from me! Why do you want to take this one, too?"

He actually stepped back like she'd hit him with a hex. Korra knew it wasn't fair, that her parents had contacted him, and maybe that's why it still bothered her so much—that it had been so easy to give up, so easy to take her away from her home and her people, and hand her off to be someone else's problem. Someone else's dead kid.

But Tenzin was in front of her, and he'd hurt her, and the only way she knew how to deal with pain was to throw it off around her, or else she'd be taken back to those long moments in the blue and the endless dark of death.

She still had nightmares, sometimes.

She found it hard to look at him, suddenly, and maybe it was guilt or shame or anger, or all three, but she walked away with heavy feet. There was a trip to the city scheduled for later, and she determinedly focused on that instead of Tenzin and his annoying eyebrows. She didn't see him again before they left.

Bolin talked the entire train ride down to New York City. Korra was secretly grateful for the fact that the trains were charmed to travel at a high speed. "We can go to Nuktuk's—oh and then I heard a new joke shop just opened up on 42nd street. I bet they have all kinds of stuff I can hide in Wing and Wei's room. Oh, and the broom shop, and—"

Mako sighed at him. "Bolin, we barely have any money. What's the point of going to all those places if we can't buy anything?"

Already feeling frustrated and hurt for reasons she still didn't understand, Korra only felt more irritated by his sulking. "Relax, Mako. We can go window shopping. What harm could it do?"

His eyebrows drew together as he glared at her. "I don't know, maybe for _some_ of us it reminds us of all the stuff we can't have."

"Don't go there, Mako—"

"Like a new broom from the Headmistress herself!"

She groaned in frustration and covered her face with her hands.

Last year, Korra had broken a school broom during one of her…moments…with the blue magic, thankfully out of view of the audience. The Headmistress had given her a new broom as a gift, saying it would be a shame to sideline one of their most promising players, especially with regionals approaching. Bolin's eyes had grown twice their size when he saw the Starsweeper LX for the first time at practice, and Mako had looked at him sadly. Korra felt bad about that, she really did, but what else was she supposed to do? It's not like she could tell them why Suyin—Headmistress Beifong, she corrected herself—had taken such an interest in her. Neither of them new about the blue magic, and it's not like she could just give the broom away, either.

Bolin laughed nervously and put his arms around both of them. "Come on, guys! It's not Korra's fault she's one of the best players on the school team, or that Headmistress Beifong is _really, really_ into quodpot. Like, really into it. You should see the posters of the New York Knarls in her office. Believe me, I've spent enough time in there to know." At that, Korra couldn't help but laugh. Though he tried his best to follow the rules, Bolin always ended up on the wrong end of someone's crazy scheme or prank and often found himself being chastised by their Headmistress. "And maybe Mako just wants to go see his new _girlfriend_." He wiggled his eyebrows and elbowed his brother in the side. Mako slouched in his seat and tried to look grumpy, but Korra saw his cheeks turn a bit pink and maybe he was even smiling.

"Girlfriend?"

She immediately forgot her fights with both Tenzin and Mako. A strange, cold feeling gripped her, some combination of betrayal and disappointment. Mako and Bolin were her best friends, and she had no idea Mako had a girlfriend. Not that he talked much about his feelings, anyway, but still…and she knew people whispered about the three of them sometimes, and she knew that some people were making assumptions about her and Mako.

Honestly, Korra kind of assumed that they would end up dating, or something. It made sense, and he was cute, and sometimes when his eyebrows did that thing it made her stomach feel a little nervous. He was brave, and loyal, and he came with her and Bolin to all of their practices and fought with them in the dueling club. And sometimes he looked at her with something extra in his eyes, something knowing, and she'd just assumed it was what she thought she knew, too.

"Yeah," Bolin murmured, leaning close in a false whisper. "And you won't believe it…but…she's a _muggle_!"

Korra felt her mouth drop open in what she knew was a stupid expression, but she couldn't help it. "What?" Except for school trips to the city, she hadn't even really seen a muggle—not since—

_You're not alone._

A soft hand in hers—clutching—green eyes wide in fear—

_Don't forget me._

Shaking the memories—dreams?—away, she tried to focus on the present. "Where did you even _meet_ a muggle?" Much less start dating her, she finished in her head. She suddenly felt silly and embarrassed for all the things she'd thought, and reminded herself that there were a lot of things she didn't know or understand and a lot of things even her best friends didn't know about her.

She felt silly, too, for still thinking of the girl from the blue light, for still clinging to the not-dreams when she felt lonely in the darkest part of the night, when the dreams haunted her and she felt like she was reliving her own death over, and over, and over.

(For feeling something in her chest at the memory of green eyes that ached more than when she looked at Mako, but that was something strange and confusing and frightening, even more than her own death in some ways, so she didn't think about that. She didn't want to think that, maybe, the girl from the blue light never thought about her.)

Mako gave her a look. "Korra, we _live_ in the city when we're not at school. With our foster family. Remember? We meet muggles all the time." He shook his head. "Three years and you still forget."

Oh, right. She sat back, feeling guilty and knowing if she said anything more it would probably just lead to another fight.

When she went back to that little house in Massachusetts on school breaks, sometimes filled with the laughter and screams of Tenzin's children, sometimes strangely and painfully empty except for the two of them, she didn't really have a chance to leave much or explore on her own. She wasn't even really allowed to send letters because they were easily traced. Mako and Bolin didn't talk that much about their foster family, and she never saw them there, so sometimes she just…forgot.

Korra realized, in that moment, that she spent a lot of time thinking about herself. She quietly resolved to try to be a better friend to the brothers.

Everything went dark outside the windows as the train began its descent into the tunnels under the city. She felt her chest clench and suddenly her wand was in her hand and the blue magic was awake and whispering.

This happened every time.

Korra tried to pretend she was just excited.

It was embarrassing to admit she was afraid of the dark, of what it whispered to her. And even if she wasn't afraid of the blue magic, she was afraid of what it could do, huge and terrifying and immense and all at her fingertips.

After agonizing minutes filled with Bolin's increasingly excited stories about the city and the new joke shop and how it was supposedly part of a chain started by old friends of Harry Potter, the train slowed to a stop and they made their way up the tunnel. All of the students were in appropriately muggle clothing. Korra tucked her wand into the waistband of her jeans, where Pema had sewn a small loop on the inside specifically for her wand. As soon as they ascended into the huge terminal, Bolin let out a yell of excitement and bolted for the doors. Korra and Mako chased after him, laughing as they wound their way through the crowd, the muggles entirely unaware of the wizards and witches passing through.

They spent the day traveling in and out of shops on 5th avenue, booths in Bryant Park, and huge and sprawling stores on 42nd street. They weren't allowed to travel any further than that, and the stern glances of the chaperones spoke of torturous detentions writing lines if they tried anything.

As they were leaving the new Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, though, Korra felt the blue magic wake up. Her hand reached for the waist of her jeans and she stopped, searching the dark alleys between shops.

"What's up, Korra?" Bolin asked around a mouthful of sweets that would give him orange hair for the rest of the day. She could already see the orange highlights at the tips.

"I thought I…heard something," she said after a minute. The feeling grew stronger and her fingertips started buzzing.

The last time that happened…

_Don't forget me._

Without realizing what she was doing, she began running, faintly aware of the yells and footsteps of the brothers behind her. Something called to her, something whispered, and it was blue and green and also dark and dangerous. Around her, the gray concrete and neon lights of the city faded into a blur vaguely pointing her to her destination.

The red lights of a store seemed to angle themselves _forward, forward_.

She passed the edge of where they were allowed to go, stumbling onto 6th Ave with a burst of panic.

_Don't forget me._

_I'm so scared._

There, in front of her, were her nightmares.

She recoiled backwards from the faceless men. This time they were real, said the blue magic in her fingertips. This time they were real and dangerous.

The busy city street faded into darkness at the edges of her vision and she was dimly aware of screaming and yelling and the screech of muggle cars—_Satomobiles?_ she remembered vaguely. Bolts of green and red and an angry purple shot past her.

_Hand over the girl, Tonraq._

Anything could be scary to the right person.

They were hurting people.

She couldn't tell what was going on, but she remembered enough from the dreams, the memories to know that what pain sounded like.

No. No. Not again. "No!"

And without another thought she leaped forward, wand in hand, shooting stunning and disarming spells wildly, and she saw one or two wands fly away, spinning magic in every direction. Her stomach dropped as she saw a bolt strike a muggle in the back and he convulsed in on himself, curling in unnaturally and she felt sick and confused.

Then a blank whiteness appeared in front of her, shrouded by a hood. "What do you think you're doing, little girl?" The voice was a voice of nightmares murmuring at the back of her mind.

Anything could be scary to the right person.

_Hand over the girl, Tonraq._

Her hand curled into a fist without her telling it to, and it struck the man in the center of that terrifying blankness and he flew back more out of surprise than pain. He reached for his wand and then the blue magic was there, whispering, and she let it come, let it slide over her in the way she'd been practicing for the last three years. It covered her like armor and she felt it in her eyes, in her fingertips, her hair floating slightly in the corners of her vision. Everything slowed. Everything turned calm.

She held her wand out and with barely a whisper, she flicked the man away and through a store window. The glass shattered, raining tiny prisms, but she sent them away too with another flick of the wrist.

In front of her, more faceless men appeared through the dim haze of spells and fear, huddled around something—no, someone, she realized in the part of her that was still Korra, the part of her that wasn't blue and terrifying strength.

Vaguely, she heard Mako and Bolin yelling and saw more wands tumbling through the air. The part of her that was still Korra realized they might get hurt, that they didn't have their own blue magic to keep them safe. She murmured "_Impedimenta!" _and it flowed out of her wand, covering the whole street, and everybody froze for ten seconds.

Ten crucial seconds, and she cast "_Stupefy!_" and forcefully sent the three men in front of her backwards, landing on the ground unmoving with sickening thumps. She had no time to think about that, though, no time to think about the overwhelming force of the spell. The blue magic urged her to move forward, and her eyes fixed on the person that had been behind the nightmare men. She breathed in and out slowly for the last three seconds of the spell.

Three.

_You're not alone_.

Two.

_Don't forget me._

One.

_I'm so scared._

Bolin and Mako came running up next to her as the spell wore off, yelling something (_sami? _she would later think) but she couldn't hear them over the loudness of her mind, the loudness of the blue magic, the loudness of her own memories.

Two familiar green eyes stared at her.

_I am so scared._


	8. Chapter 8

_A/N: Sorry for the delay, everyone. A bunch of real life stuff happened (ie, moving) that got in the way of writing, but I was determined to get something done soon, so I stayed up late tonight and finished this up. I rewrote the last third of this at least three times. I know everyone was anxious about the cliffhanger, so I hope this satisfies that at least partially (though I'm not sure it will live up to everyone's hopes!)._

* * *

It took three years for the blue to come back into her life, and Asami wondered if she had ever really seen the color since that day…since Kuvira…

That day.

It joined the growing collection of not-memories, of waking nightmares that marked significant and terrible moments in her life. She used to think they were separate, but Asami Sato wasn't graduating high school at the age of fifteen for no reason.

Asami Sato was smart, and Asami Sato knew that her careful science didn't explain everything. It couldn't, after all, explain the sudden disappearance of Baatar from the school. It couldn't explain the fuzzy memories of green light and angry red. It couldn't explain the faint memory of a touch, a blue light—nothing quite distinct, like it was a dream she started to forget but one that never faded entirely.

Sometimes, when it was quiet and she worked alone in her room, she heard a whisper:

_Don't forget me._

And her hand would clench around her pencil and her protractor would slide a little out of line, and a strange trembling would overcome her.

_Who are you?_ she wondered. She couldn't even see their face, but a strange ache sat hollowly in her stomach, an ache of loss she didn't quite understand.

Asami should have scoffed at the idea of magic and strange bolts of light and the idea that someone could speak to her without really being there, but Asami wasn't graduating high school at fifteen for no reason.

After all, simpler theories could be tested, observed, evaluated—complex ones couldn't. And for everything that had happened, there were only two remaining (simple) theories:

Either Asami's reality was not as real as she thought (a terrifying thought that reminded her of the hidden lies behind her father's glances), or there were was really such a thing as magic.

She'd gone over it a thousand times. She'd stayed up late into the night working out equations and designs for things that could produce the lights and effects she'd seen (death—stunning—life), but each draft only grew more and more complicated until she'd finally either have to accept there was technology she couldn't conceive of or magic she couldn't conceive of.

Since she doubted teenagers could have somehow gotten hold of advanced technology even she'd never run across in her father's designs, Asami settled on the latter choice after more than a year of obsessive hypothesizing.

It was freeing, in some way.

Terrifying, in the long dark moments of the night, in the sprawling isolation of her father's house, but freeing. She could go about her school work knowing there was nothing to do, nothing she could explain, nothing she could _know_. So Asami focused on what she did, and could, know: numbers. Formulas. Designs. Architecture and technology. All of the things she would need to learn to someday head Future Industries herself.

(And, quietly, the magic and the blue went out of Asami's life. It went so quietly she almost didn't notice. Almost, except that the blue still came to her in her dreams, wild and free and immense.)

She began traveling into the city on research trips with her peers when she was a sophomore. One day, there, she met Mako.

Asami was graduating from high school at the age of fifteen for a reason, so when she ran into a boy at fourteen, with shifting eyes and the hesitant drifts at the end of his sentence, she knew, somehow. Some part of her, the part that still dreamed in blue, leaped in recognition.

For a moment, the magic came back to her, and then it was gone. It stayed around long enough, though, for her to start going into the city more frequently ("research trips") to see him. He showed her a side of the city she had never considered before, one that lay behind the well-manicured store windows and the tourists and the men in suits. They found the best places to escape, the best roofs and small hills in the park where they could observe the city and make stories about its people.

Mako would see a happy family on every sidewalk. His stories were always short and to the point, but full of nostalgia and regret. Often, too, he seemed to guess what may have been the _real_ story, but Asami tried to pretend they weren't real. Asami wanted to go back to places of not-dreams and not-memories, where she wasn't crazy for having seen the red light. Asami wanted to believe that Mako was part of that space, and that each time they met, she was quietly slipping out of her own reality of equations and rules and her father.

She never told Mako she knew, and she still wasn't entirely sure _what_ she knew either, except that it involved magic sticks and red and green lights and people getting hurt.

He knew her name—_Asami Sato_—and he knew her face. She wasn't sure, though, how much he knew Asami, the girl who saw red and green in her dreams and the girl who wanted the thing she should have hated most to be real. She wasn't sure how much he knew the girl who wanted to press her hand into the blue light and find one waiting for her, calmly, pleading _Don't forget me_.

When she first pressed her hand into Mako's, she'd hoped it would be his. It wasn't. His hand was too firm, too callused, not quite the soft but subtle strength she'd felt years ago wrapped in blue.

_Don't forget me._

Even despite the terror and the fear of the impossible, Asami felt the worst about forgetting. She thought she saw an outline of a face sometimes in her dreams, and sometimes she had visions of walking across a wide lawn, mountains stretching up to kiss a distant horizon. There would be a person next to her, but when she turned to look, she saw only a faint outline.

One day, not long before her exceptionally early graduation, she received a letter from Mako. They were always written in a curious, slanting text, with blots of what she assumed was ink scattered around the page like teardrops. Occasionally, she heard the scraping of wings and thought she saw the outline of some large bird, perhaps an owl.

(Another clue about this magical, not-real world—she assumed they didn't have much use for technology.)

The letter told her he'd be on a trip with his school to the city, and that he'd hoped they could meet up somewhere on 5th Ave. That Saturday, she found herself riding the train in. She relished these moments, when she was simply one girl on a train and the high buildings of the city swallowed her into the underbelly of its infrastructure. For Asami, the buildings, the tunnels, the metal and the electricity all _spoke_ to her. The world hummed with possibility and numbers and endless discovery and the city was a sprawling set of fits and starts of engineering and wonder.

Before her father's company, New York's infrastructure was held together—literally—by duct tape, rubber bands, paperclips, and the general stubbornness of New Yorkers born and bred. Her father had outfitted the city with elaborate, high-speed rails and infrastructure built sometime _after_ 1945 as part of a government contract. In the curve of the engine and the lightness of the rails themselves, Asami saw the influence of Japan, her father's first home.

Asami wanted to change the world, too. Asami wanted to give something of Hiroshi Sato's to New York someday, when he would be too old to do so himself.

Most of all, she wanted to give something of her mother's. What that would be, she wasn't entirely sure, but she remembered a soft voice spinning fantastic stories at night. They were stories of love and adventure. Asami wanted to build that world. These were the stories Asami saw on street corners, and they were the ones she never shared with Mako.

Because, after all, Asami sought exactly that which seemed to have caused the most loss. She sought the impossible, the fantastic, the magical. She sought the strange lights, the not-real people, the hesitant lies at the end of a sentence. Whatever this magic was, it caused her loss, and yet she still yearned for it. She'd said goodbye to her mother, lost to the cold green light (_Baatar's eyes—Kuvira's, darker_); her father, still alive but lost to grief; her sensible world, lost to the red bolt; the hand in hers, a feeling of being not-alone for the first time in her life, the warm strength of it—lost to the blue and a white, peaceful light she thought of as _oblivion_. In the fifteen years of her life, she'd spent so much time grieving, alone.

The train came to a smooth stop and she exited into the grand building. Lost in thought, though, she reached 5th Ave quickly and didn't see Mako outside the library. Her train had gotten in a few minutes earlier than they'd planned to meet, so she decided to continue walking around the block. Satomobiles whirred by like bees, their efficient, electric motors humming in typical afternoon traffic.

When she turned the corner onto 6th Ave, though, the sound of the engines faded to the background. Everything slowed as she finished rounding the corner and she saw what was waiting. Waiting, it seemed, for her. The crowds and cars melted away into a group of tall people with no faces. It was something out of a nightmare, one faint and one she recognized as not hers, one that belonged to the hand in the blue light and the school in the mountains and the trees.

Instinctively, she tucked in on herself and rolled to the side as a bolt of red light shot past her. She came back to her feet with her fists held in front of her, but they trembled where she held them. The light was one out of a nightmare, too, and this time it was one of her own. A senseless terror overwhelmed her, and she felt her chest heave on an unsteady breath.

She managed to dodge an angry purple blast and automatically added it to the list of things she knew about this strange world. Even through her terror, her engineer's mind continued to document and catalogue almost defensively, trying to remain rational and calm. One of them attempted to grab her, but she caught the inside of his forearm on hers, then spun low into a powerful elbow jab. She felt more than heard the air leave his lungs, and she continued spinning to sweep her leg behind his ankle to pull him to the ground. The sound his head made as it connected with the ground would haunt her dreams for years.

Later, she vowed, somewhere in the back of her mind, she would thank her over-protective father for enrolling her in self-defense classes.

She was turning to face the remainder when a spell glanced off her shoulder. Her arm suddenly became dead weight, ignoring all of her frantic signals to _move, move_. Another burst of hot, searing light made her feet trip together, and she fell forward.

There were simply too many of them, and they knew too much of something she still didn't understand. Faintly, she heard someone shouting, "Alive, alive! We need her!" and the words settled like a weight in her throat.

Her desperate heart reached out frantically, calling for the blue light that had always come to her before in times of loneliness and distress, but there was nothing but cold, unfeeling concrete, the hot pavement under her cheek. As the figures drew nearer, long cloaks or robes billowing around their feet in an unfelt wind, she flinched in horror. Where faces would have been was a blank whiteness, one that seemed to pinch slightly where mouths should have been. The whiteness stared unblinkingly, like one horrifying eye, observing. Hunting.

Then suddenly it was there—blue sweeping down the street, blue calling to her, telling her it would be alright. She turned to look through the legs of the faceless men, but she saw only a silhouette in the blue, her eyes burning as if trying to look into the sun.

Several impossible things happened rapidly—glass shattering into rainbow particles, then drifting away. A frozen timelessness taking over everyone in the street except the figure in blue. The men standing before her blasting backward.

Asami felt her legs and her arm return to normal, and she lifted herself slightly, panting. Her heart felt heavy as the blue receded, just when she had found it, but something told her to _look up, look up_, that it hadn't quite left yet.

Footsteps approached. There was a hesitant whisper about them, a nervous anticipation, and Asami felt her hand clench in sympathy on the pavement.

_Look up_, she told herself, willing the numbing terror to leave her body, willing her hands to stop shaking. She fought against the seemingly insurmountable weight of her head, and raised it slowly and painfully.

When she finally lifted her head, she looked straight into blue eyes that possessed a magic entirely of their own. Her heart seized in her chest and her breath caught. A faint memory whispered at the corners of her mind.

_Don't forget me_.

A hand reached down in front of her, and Asami stared at it, barely daring to hope. Shaking out of either fear or three years of pent up loneliness, she slowly raised her own. As she placed her hand into the strong palm, she felt everything tilt. Memories played out, ones half-forgotten. They were of someone who may as well have been a ghost—

_Is this a dream?_

_Does it matter?_

_You're not alone._

_You're not alone._

_Blue eyes, bright and glittering in contrast to dark skin. A hesitant smile. Bold courage as the girl tried to pull and keep her safely in the blue light._

Asami opened her eyes, not realizing she had closed them, and a brilliant magic entered her life again. The gray concrete faded to blue, blue, _blue_, and Asami thought it must have been the most wonderful color.

With an easy motion, the strong hand pulled her to her feet and she found herself once again lost in familiar eyes. She remembered the face, now, too, though it had changed over the years. The other girl's jaw had squared slightly, her cheeks hollowed in adolescence.

To Asami, beauty was in numbers and symmetry, equations and predictable patterns, but there was something…beautiful about blue, something she couldn't map out and explain. It was just a feeling, hovering in the corners of her eyes like the blue light, waiting for the moments when she felt the world was sterile and cold and lonely to remind her that it could be beautiful, too.

"Is this a dream?" Asami murmured, not sure if she meant it as a joke or as something rather like a prayer. The ghost in front of her made a sound that might have been a laugh, a sudden exhale from her lungs that whispered across Asami's cheeks.

"You didn't forget?" (Asami would later realize she'd never really heard, felt, hope until she heard that whispered sentence.)

She shook her head. "Because of you, I think." Her chest felt tight at the admission and the memories that came with it. "I couldn't remember all the details until now…" She trailed off, a giddy lightness in her chest, but a noise from behind the girl distracted her.

Slowly, Asami became aware of their surroundings again, of the figures strewn about the pavement, of someone calling—

"Asami?"

Mako.

She was wrenched from the blue and the magic, and she tried to stifle an irrational resentment toward him. She blamed the feeling on the terror and loneliness on finding, suddenly, the one memory that she could count on to ease the painful quickness of her heart. To fight back the green nightmares. (Asami was sensitive to people lying to her, perhaps because, really, she lied to herself more than anyone.)

Though Mako wasn't always the most expressive person, she turned to see him moving slowly to her, hands outstretched. A part of her wanted the solid comfort she would find with him, the steady calm that he radiated. Another part of her wanted to sink back to the ground and wait until the world stopped being terrifying again. And a tiny, whispering voice just wanted to reach back into the blue, to touch a strong hand that would hold her and keep her from slipping into madness.

Her hands were still shaking. The fear was still a dead weight in her throat, sticking it closed.

Before he could get close, though, a voice interrupted.

"Whoa, is that your girlfriend, Mako?!" She turned automatically to find a stocky young man gaping at her and pointing. Her engineer's eye swiftly noted the dark hair, the shape of his jaw. Even if his face was wider, his eyes larger and green, she saw a shadow of Mako's face in his, before he launched in a tirade barely punctuted by breathing. "Wow, she's really pretty! Wait, isn't she a muggle? Oh man, oh man, this is bad, bro, they're totally gonna zap her memories, and the Chief is gonna kill us, especially after what happened last summer—"

"Dude, stop—she can hear you!"

Several things happened at once, then. There was a bright cracking noise that made Asami flinch. It sounded like a firecracker, or maybe a gunshot, but she had never _really_ heard one of those so she couldn't be sure. And simultaneously, the girl next to her had sunk back as soon as—Mako's brother?—started speaking, curling in on herself defensively. There seemed suddenly a huge chasm between them, one Asami wasn't sure if she could cross. She became abruptly and acutely aware of how separate the girl's, and Mako's, world was from her own.

"Bolin," a stern voice said, and Asami wasn't sure where it had come from, though distantly she thought it had come with the cracking noise, maybe, but everything was coming to her slowly. It felt like her brain was constantly one or two seconds behind what was actually occurring around her. "What the _hell_ happened here? You idiots destroyed half the block in front of Dumbledore knows _how_ many muggles."

"Oh man, Mako, when she says _his_ name you know we're in for it."

An older woman stalked into Asami's field of vision, glaring down at her and the girl next to her (except the girl with the blue, blue eyes wasn't really next to her, she was far away, in a world Asami couldn't reach her). Gray, billowing robes floated behind the woman like angry thunderheads and Asami shrank back from the green in her eyes instinctively.

"Chief, you're scaring her! You—she's—"

Mako's voice. Trying to be protective, trying to save that illusion of their happy times overlooking the hills, the stories of happy families on street corners. Except Asami's happy family had been destroyed by green, and magic, a long time ago, and he couldn't protect her. He didn't know that it wasn't the woman who scared her, but her green eyes, a green she saw in her nightmares, a green she saw in Kuvira's eyes. A green she saw every time she looked in the mirror.

Asami would have to protect herself.

The woman continued to study her with a deep frown creasing the edges of her mouth. "You don't think she was already scared, kid? She's practically ready to drop face first onto the road. She has no idea what's going on." Her hand reached into her robes and pulled out one of those stick-like objects. Something softened in the corners of her expression, just slightly. "Hold still, alright? This'll all go away soon enough."

Asami Sato straightened up and looked past the green and into the pupil of the imposing woman.

Asami Sato knew liars, and knew people who were hiding things from her, and knew people who wanted to hurt her, and that slight softness in the woman's face—the Chief's—was all she needed to right her world again and drive the fear back. Despite the green.

She felt the girl next to her shift, felt her suddenly come back into Asami's tiny space of trust, heard her yelling "Stop!" at the Chief. But Asami shook her head, and there was silence. The group of them froze like that, standing in the midst of a chaotic scene. She realized that there were many other people in gray robes appearing and disappearing with the faceless—

_Not faceless_, she tried to convince herself. She fought the fear back, and her powerful brain took hold for long enough to get her through this strange moment. _Not nightmares. Just…men. People._

"I'm not afraid," she said, lifting her chin to keep the tremble out of her voice. "I know exactly what you are."

It was a bluff, on some level, because she didn't know _exactly_, but it was enough for the Chief to lower her hand, enough for her eyes to widen just so in surprise. It was enough to maybe, maybe convince her that Asami didn't need to forget.

_Don't forget me._

Unconsciously, she searched out the girl next to her in the corner of her eye. A strange calm overcame her as she saw blue eyes staring at her earnestly. If she reached her hand out, she knew she would find a strong one, waiting. But something held Asami back, something about the stare she could feel from Mako.

"You're…" What did they call themselves? She settled on, "magic."

The woman opened her mouth to interject, her eyebrows raised in an expression caught between surprise and outrage. Somewhere to the side, Mako had let out a gasp of shock and Bolin some sort of high-pitched squeak. Asami forged on before the Chief could say anything or before she could let herself feel guilty for having kept it a secret this long. "And I know you can make me…forget." _Oblivion._ "But I don't think you'll want to."

After a moment, the woman's gray eyebrows lowered in suspicion and she cast a look at the three teenagers, silently interrogating them to see if they'd been the ones to tell her. Mako and his—brother?—stood open-mouthed in obvious confusion, but the girl next to her shifted a bit guiltily. The Chief's eyes focused on her with laser-like precision, and Asami hastily continued to redirect her attention.

"I have information for you." Clearly this woman was part of some sort of…magical…law enforcement, and perhaps the head of it, judging by her title. "Important information." Another bluff—she didn't exactly know _that_ much, but maybe this time her throat wouldn't stick closed and maybe this time she would be able to remember everything. "How else would I know who—what—you are?"

"Hm." The woman gave a low grunt, and she turned to the people disappearing with the unconscious bodies. One slumped form was being puzzled over by a few people in gray robes. "That one wasn't hit by anything magical," she said, gesturing to the prone figure. "That you?"

Asami's elbow tingled with the memory of colliding with the man's stomach. Her own lurched a bit as she remembered the sound his head made on the pavement. Swallowing the memory back, she nodded.

Her green gaze turned back to Asami. After a moment, she seemed to come to a decision. "Alright. You're coming to our downtown station. We'll at least see if you have anything worthwhile to say." Turning to the other three teenagers, she tightened her jaw in a rather intimidating stare. "You three will be receiving formal summons later not only for underage magic, but also for breaching Clause 73." She cast a baleful glare around the street. "And for tearing up my damn city."

Studying them for a long moment, she paused, pointing at the girl with blue eyes. "And you," she said, jerking her other thumb over her shoulder. "You're coming downtown, too. I know exactly who you are, so don't bother trying to hide it."

Asami turned to see the girl pale, and her blue eyes met Asami's for one desperate moment. She had no idea what caused the desperation, what was behind the mingled fear and hope in her eyes, and all she could do was shift just enough so the backs of their hands brushed. The aching in her throat eased, and she saw the blue eyes soften, slightly, in calm. In the background, she could see Mako and Bolin's confused faces, see their mouths opening in argument. The Chief shook her head.

"That's final. Frankly, you're lucky I'm not taking your wands now. You two," gesturing to Asami and the girl, "with me. We'll take the muggle—the subway." She began to turn, then paused with her gaze on the girl with blue eyes. "Korra." It seemed to be a question, but the finality in her voice made it clear she had no doubts.

The girl—Korra—flinched, then nodded, turning her gaze down to the road.

_Korra._

"And?" the woman said, turning her intense stare onto Asami.

"Asami. Uh…Sato."

They began to move toward the nearest subway station, and the woman muttered something. Whatever she'd said made her melt into her surroundings. Asami panicked, realizing she had no idea what stop they'd be getting off at, realizing she was, just like years before, about to go somewhere she'd never been before with near-strangers.

The woman must have seen her face. "Don't worry, Miss Sato. I'm still here, and you're safe. Just get on the subway." By tilting her head and searching the corner of her eye, Asami could barely, just barely, see the Chief striding next to them with long, impatient steps. For some reason, the honest agitation made her calm. This would not be like Baatar and Kuvira. This was not a deception, and the woman wanted nothing from her except the truth.

She glanced at Korra, who seemed to have lost all the blue, her eyes downcast like the gray, high buildings around them. Still, she was there, and real, and not just a dream, and not just a memory.

_Don't forget me._

So Asami bumped their hands again and tightened her mouth in what she hoped might be a smile, and whispered, "You're not alone."

* * *

Korra would think, later, that not all magic was cast with wands.


	9. Chapter 9

_A/N: Thank you so much for all of the feedback! It's really great to see this story starting to reach more people, and I'm glad you're enjoying it. It makes writing a bit less painful or angst-ridden. That said, it took me a long time to let myself be okay with how this chapter turned out. I feel like my ability to write dialogue is limited, but, well, here we are. I edited a lot of the prose and descriptions, too. We'll see how you think it turned out. As always, comments are much appreciated. Thanks for reading!_

* * *

There was an entire world under the ground of the city.

Asami had always known this, to an extent, but she hadn't realized how far it stretched. It stood before them, on and on into countless tunnels through the darkness. The Chief had shed whatever magic concealed her—a _disillusionment charm_, Korra had said—and now strode impatiently in front of them. Every so often her head would rotate and glare back, as if daring either of them to run.

Next to her, Korra murmured a hasty description as she kept a wary eye on the Chief's back. (Asami didn't think Korra really should have been telling her anything, based on the fact that she was whispering, but she found Korra's brief explanations kept the mind numbing terror of the day's events at bay.)

"That leads to the—uh, there's this network, called the 'floo network'…anyway, if you go through there, it'll take you straight to the Magical Congress. In Washington D.C."

It should have shocked her, but Asami merely nodded. Her brain felt lukewarm and hazy. Nothing could have really surprised her at this point, as if she'd spent all of her ability to be surprised earlier in the day on an elbow in someone else's gut.

"The tunnels there are nicer," Korra said after a pause. "I went once. Tenzin…um, my…teacher wasn't too happy about it. I'm not really supposed to leave. Especially not through the floo network."

Distantly, they heard the echo of a subway. Its roaring call sounded off the walls, an echo of an echo. Water shook and dripped from the ceiling. Asami shivered. It didn't surprise her that this underground network in New York might have been less well-kept than other cities'. Before her father had redesigned the subway system, it had been a sprawling mess of garbage and rats, and the faint odor of urine clung to it in a thick miasma.

They rounded a corner, and the Chief glared at Korra, who promptly fell silent. Asami saw her eyes narrow, though, at the woman's back, and she surprised Asami into laughing by sticking her tongue out at the stern woman's back.

_I'm not really supposed to leave._

Korra.

There was something different about her. Of course, there was something different about all of them—the Chief, Mako, Bolin—but Korra especially. Asami hadn't seen any evidence of the blue light around the other three, no evidence that it clung to them in that strange, haunting power. And she seemed to be governed by a separate set of rules—not being able to leave, being asked to come speak to the Chief when the other two were sent away.

Like Asami, who'd spent her whole life following rules other kids her age never had to worry about. Driver pick up times. New design plans. Being at the right place at the right time, or an entire police search party would be searching for her in hours. The day she'd met Kuvira, she'd walked in to see her father clutching a phone, his finger hovering over the final "1" of an emergency dial. Something about the hesitance in Korra's movements said she'd felt that oppressive fear, too: the fear of outside cultivated carefully by people trying to keep her in.

But Korra had broken out of her world of harsh restrictions, in some way. There was an uncontrollable energy about her that made Asami feel a little lighter, too. Asami had felt it all those years ago, reaching into the blue light for the first time, gripping her hand.

There was also something different about Korra that had nothing to do with the blue, or except maybe it did—but the blue in her eyes, which had a different sort of haunting power altogether. The thought came and went, though; Asami's tired brain had given in, simply absorbing her surroundings and propelling her forward.

Eventually, they came to a wall. The Chief turned around on her heel in one quick motion. "I know you've come this way," she said with a thin finger jabbed in Korra's direction. "But you—" it moved in front of Asami's face— "just watch, okay?"

And then the Chief turned around and simply strode through the wall. Asami blinked at the place she had been. It was as if the woman had simply been swallowed into the dim shadows of the tunnels, as if the city had eaten her alive. Where she'd been standing came only the steady drip of condensation off of concrete stalactites. On the other side, Asami could only assume, lay an entire magical world.

"Come on," Korra said next to her. "It's alright. It's fun. Here—"

Her hand reached out and took Asami's, and Asami felt the confusion buzzing in her brain fade into a warm, piercing clarity. Time slowed and with it, her heartbeat. She focused on the warmth and strength of Korra's hand, gently pulling her forward toward the blank concrete.

It struck her, in that strange moment in between worlds, in between two cities—one new and sterile and remade by the hands of her father, the other hidden and dirty and heavy with years of old old air—it struck her that this was what she had both dreamed of and feared those long nights in her room, writing equations, trying to explain the red light.

Asami had sought magic. She'd found it in Mako, and she'd found it, horrifyingly, with those blank, pinched faces earlier. But it hadn't found her until this moment when a calm, radiating warmth promised to bring her into that new world. It was no longer a game for her to play, sitting and pretending she was someone else on top of a hill—this was real.

Magic was real, and it was both beautiful and terrifying to her, then. Both blue and green, both bright and dank.

She must have squeezed Korra's hand because she became suddenly aware of the strong bones under her fingers, and the other girl's fingers tightened around hers for a moment.

_It's fun._

_You're not alone._

Asami turned to smile at Korra, and was surprised to see her already looking at her, blue eyes bright and free in that instant, without the Chief, without faceless men chasing them, without someone trying to pull Asami out of her world.

"Ready?" Korra asked, the corner of her mouth tilting up in a crooked, rakish grin that somehow made Asami feel a little braver.

There was only one answer for Asami:

"Let's do it."

And they crossed into a different world.

* * *

Korra wasn't always the most sensitive person. She knew that. More than once, she'd let Bolin and Mako down by forgetting something important, or by forgetting to ask how they felt about something.

_Is that your girlfriend, Mako?_

Still, a combination of protectiveness and excitement made her cling to Asami's hand fiercely the entire way to the Chief's office once they'd passed through the Wall. For some inexplicable reason, she wanted Asami to like the Wizarding World, but she also knew it probably wasn't like anything Asami had seen before. Korra wouldn't blame Asami, either, if she was afraid.

But Asami impressed Korra—she did that a lot, even in the few moments they'd shared together. Somehow, earlier, Asami had actually taken down one of the—

_A blank whiteness appeared in front of her. "What do you think you're doing, little girl?"_

Her heart squeezed in senseless fear, but she pushed the feeling away.

Asami had actually taken down a—a wizard (willing herself not to remember what they looked like, the eerie blankness of their faces)—without any magic at all. Even before that, years ago, in that time that felt more like someone else's memories than Korra's, Asami had been brave. The muggle had reached her hand into the blue with no idea what she would find. And whatever had happened the day Asami almost lost her memories of Korra, the dark-haired girl had somehow reached back in and found her again.

It was that day that taught Korra how to control the blue magic, and even though she still didn't understand it entirely (and it even baffled Tenzin, how she could suddenly summon it at her will), she knew it had something to do with Asami and the fleeting touch in the blue.

So Korra silently vowed, as they walked down hidden streets tucked into the southern end of the island, that she would give Asami some sort of magic back, too. Somehow. Something to take with her to remember, so she could push away whatever memories haunted the dark background of her green eyes.

When the Chief wasn't looking, Korra hastily pointed out offices to Asami. Most of the New York Wizarding community was spread out over the entire city, but important buildings and departments were concentrated in one concealed neighborhood. They passed the New York General Hospital for Magical Mishaps and Injuries, the Office for Ethical Breeding (Korra shuddered a little as they passed it; she was summoned there once because someone at school realized Naga was not entirely a dog), the New York Magical Judiciary, and Korra's personal favorite, the New York Office for the Regulation of Sports and Games.

Finally, they arrived at a huge building. Six stone pillars guarded the front doors imperiously. Korra felt Asami take a half step back at the snarling faces of various stone magical creatures, then jump as the statue of a Chimaera roared in her face.

"All roar and no bite," Korra said brightly, pulling Asami away, though her hand hovered over the wand tucked under her robes. Just in case.

(She would always remember one ill-fated trip to see Toph when a statue of a Kneazle had clamped its jaw on her leg. Apparently it had sensed the Exploding Snap cards in her pocket.)

They ascended a tall staircase, still gripping hands. Asami's had grown slightly damp under her own, and Korra felt a seed of worry begin to flower in her chest.

What if it was simply too much for Asami?

What if the Chief realized that and took her memories away anyway?

(What if Asami forgot Korra, for good this time?)

(It didn't cross Korra's mind once that it might matter to Mako, too, if Asami lost her memories.)

There wasn't much time for Korra to reflect on this sudden, terrifying concern, though, as they entered through tall doors and came to a creaking elevator. As they stepped onto the metal grate of the floor, a curious shudder ran through Asami. Korra turned to find her—_glaring_ at the walls of the compartment.

"How old is this thing?" Asami blurted out. It was the first time she'd spoken since the tunnels, outside of a murmured expression of surprise here or there. "How is it even holding our weight right now?" With a jerk, the elevator began to move, and the eyes of the wizards and witches in it all fell on the girl in strange clothing standing near the doors as her hands gestured accusingly at the metal. "And we're actually _moving!_ Well, if I needed any more proof that magic is real…"

"Miss Sato," came the firm, grumpy voice of the Chief from somewhere over Korra's right shoulder. "Please _try_ not to draw unnecessary attention to yourself, as difficult as that might be."

At that, Asami suddenly subsided into quiet, her hands falling back to her sides. It was the most words Korra had heard Asami speak, and for the first time, it struck Korra that she didn't actually _know_ that much about the other girl.

Well, that was, perhaps, not strictly true. Korra knew she was probably the prettiest person she'd ever seen. (And that was just objective fact. The way Asami's high cheekbones emphasized the slender hollow of her cheek, how her chin pointed just so under her mouth, how the green of her eyes darkened and brightened in different light—well, it was no wonder Mako was dating her.)

Korra knew, too, that she was smart, and brave, and apparently could fight.

But she didn't know what Asami did as a muggle. What were muggle schools like? What did they study? What did they do with such an energetic mind? Did they have classes where they taught muggles to defend themselves against…whatever the muggle equivalent of dark magic was? She didn't think so, considering all the muggles that simply ran when confronted with danger earlier that day. Not that she blamed them, but it didn't seem like they were trained to confront evil forces of any sort. Wizards and witches ran, too, but most had at least a small ability to gauge danger and defend themselves. So that made Asami special for a muggle too, she guessed.

Suddenly she felt bad, realizing she'd dragged Asami into her own world without really trying to understand the other girl's at all.

She opened her mouth to ask all the questions now burning in the back of her throat, but the elevator gave a coughing little buzz and opened its doors.

"First floor's us," the Chief said and swept past them. Asami and Korra followed her hesitantly.

The halls might have been spectacular, once. Molding crested the meeting between each wall and the ceiling and outlined every doorway. It was the same sort of molding that marked the edges of the house in Massachusetts, and she remembered it especially because Tenzin had gone out of his way to make sure the trim was a proper color. Her muggle sneakers scuffed along the marble floor, and she imagined she could see the faint outlines of a time when the neighborhood had been home to the Wizarding World's rich and powerful.

Now, though, the plaster was cracked in a few places, paint chips drearily flaking onto the floor. The marble didn't shine the way she expected it too, and she could see the faint stain of a darker color under the molding.

Korra had never been to this particular floor. When they'd visited Toph, the old woman usually met them outside in some innocuous café, or in an abandoned alley behind the huge building. She wondered if the Chief knew how dangerous it might be to bring Korra into its halls. People were giving them curious looks as it was, the two girls in stained and torn muggle clothes, the Chief marching down the hallway with a sweep of her robes.

They arrived at an innocuous wooden door. The Chief tapped her wand against its knob a few times, muttered a word or two Korra didn't catch, and it swung inside the room. They piled into what turned out to be a relatively small office. With an irritated flick of her wand, the Chief summoned two chairs from somewhere outside the hallway. Korra saw Asami's eyes track them with interest—and perhaps a small, dark little fear in her pupils—as they flew into the room and skidded to a halt.

"Sit," the Chief said with a growl, and the two of them sat like someone had pushed them into the chairs. She said something else, but Korra missed it, her attention focused instead on a small placard shoved to the side of the desk and partially obscured by parchment.

_Chief of N.Y. Patrollers, L. Beifong._

She stared. _Beifong?_

Of course. The same slightly wavy gray hair, the piercing green eyes, the temper. It also explained how she knew who Korra was.

Korra wondered how many Beifongs there were.

She also wondered if Suyin was the black sheep of her family, with her kind eyes and her firm but loving hand at school as Headmistress.

Then she realized Asami was talking and rapidly attempted to focus on the conversation.

"…about three years ago," the other girl was saying in a measured voice, though Korra could see her hands tremble in her lap. She resisted the temptation to reach over and take her hand again, and the impulse startled her. While she liked hugs, she'd never been one for…handholding… But then again, she'd never really had a girl friend either. (If she could even call Asami her friend.)

"Start from the beginning," Chief Beifong said, but a gleam of interest and a sort of manic happiness had entered her eye. The expression frightened Korra a little, particularly since it was the closest thing to a smile she'd seen on the woman's face.

Asami's mouth pinched in a way that told Korra the expression had disturbed her too, but she forged on. "I attend a school that focuses specifically on engineering and technology. In particular, our focus is on civil engineering and the material sciences, though I also take courses in electronics and robotics." A small silence followed her words, and she hesitated, maybe realizing she would need to rephrase. "I study how to…make cars, bridges, roads, phones—really anything that…non-magical…people use in our day to day lives." She paused again, and the Chief waved her on impatiently. "While I was there, I…became friends with…studied with…an older student. I was young compared to most of my classmates, and he showed me some of his designs and theories.

"His name was Baatar, though I never really found out his last name—"

She was interrupted by a mean laugh from the Chief. Asami flinched back as the woman leaned slightly out of her chair, fingers gripping her desk like talons. "You don't expect me to believe that, do you? You seriously think that I'll believe Baatar Jr. just _happened_ to be in your class?"

"I…I'm sorry, I don't—"

At Asami's clearly confused expression, the Chief paused. Her eyes narrowed. There was a tapping noise, and Korra realized she was drumming her wand against the desk. Finally, she seemed to accept that Asami's confusion was genuine, though her eyes remained suspicious, lids hanging low over her irises. "Well, nevermind that, for now. Go on and we'll see whether I believe this whole thing. And make sure you tell me how _this_ reckless idiot is involved." Korra automatically tensed, a hot fire burning at the base of her skull, but she breathed slowly through her nose. She wanted to hear what Asami had to say, too, and getting mad would only get her in trouble.

"Um…" The girl cleared her throat. "Okay…well, one day, Baatar wanted me to go with him somewhere. He didn't really tell me where, but he made it seem like I would be interested in whatever it was. We met someone—his girlfriend—and got in a car."

At that, the Chief stood, her hand trembling in a white knuckled grip on her wand. Korra reached for hers automatically. Chief or not, she was ready to fight back if needed. "Her name?" she barked, loudly enough that the sound echoed off the windows, and Korra felt the blue magic jump to her fingertips in defense.

"Ku…" The girl hesitated, the word sticking in her throat, as if she were choking. Then she coughed a little, and the name left her lips in a weak whisper: "Kuvira."

The papers on the Chief's desk swirled up and slammed into the walls in an explosive motion of uncontrolled magic, and Korra and Asami ducked to the floor to avoid it. "_Shit!_ I _told_ her—" The door swung open, dangling off its hinges, before a sudden silence swept over the room. With it went the air out of their lungs, the light from the sun, and Korra rasped in a shaky breath.

Korra decided the Chief was not someone she should ever make angry. It was the most powerful display of wordless magic she'd seen from anyone beside herself, and its raw, uncontrolled force actually frightened her. A little.

Not that she would ever tell anyone that.

She glanced over at Asami, whose face had contorted into a look of terror, her eyes sunken in above the high cheekbones. "It's alright," she murmured around a gasp of air. The other girl's eyes tracked down, and then inexplicably, she calmed, her hands falling from her ears to the floor.

Looking down, Korra saw that the blue magic had begun to hum slightly around her hands, and that Asami had seen it.

Somehow, the blue magic had calmed the muggle. The realization made her breath stop. In its place grew something so intense it choked the back of her throat.

Asami felt comforted by the blue magic. In the back of her mind, this made sense; the only times they'd met, Korra and Asami had comforted each other. Korra had, somehow, used the blue magic to prevent her memories from being obliviated. In the rest of her mind, though, the young witch was surprised and confused and afraid at the intensity of emotion she felt.

The realization that Asami felt safe around the blue was both warm and bittersweet. Knowing that someone could see the blue magic, even after the events earlier that day, and actually find it comforting—it soothed years of terror built up in the dusty corners of her mind. At the same time, though, Asami hadn't seen what it could do. She hadn't seen the destruction she'd unintentionally brought on the forests in the Berkshires, on Tenzin, who'd more than once had to be treated by Katara after their sessions. She hadn't seen Korra the day she'd died, hadn't seen the way the blue light had been the only thing suggesting that maybe she wasn't gone entirely, hadn't seen the way it sucked all the color out of her eyes and made them glow.

She hadn't seen the blue light when it had shone from the depths of the earth in a cold tear that brought only dark magic and death.

What would she think when she did?

(Because it was inevitable to her, really, that Korra would lose control of it again. That Korra would use it for some purpose other than fighting away terrifying, pale, faceless men. Sometimes Korra thought that maybe the tear didn't _really_ close—it just moved. To inside of her mind.)

Suddenly, though, the Girl Who Died found herself lifted back into the chair. Next to her, Asami was placed in her seat by an unseen force. The dark-haired girl gripped the arms of her seat tightly as if gripping them would right the world.

The Chief was back behind her desk, stray strands flung loose from her otherwise neat hair. Around them, sunlight once again filtered through the dirty windows, spattering the room with a gray glow. "Kuvira showed you magic," she said flatly. Her wand clicked on the table as Asami nodded. With an impatient wave, the Chief muttered, "_Reparo_," and the door to the small office fixed itself. "What spell did she cast?"

For a moment, the muggle stared. Korra saw her eyes track around the room in thought before settling back on the Chief. "She…I don't know. It was red, and she used it on Baatar. He fell and didn't move again until she did another…spell."

Chief Beifong's nostrils flared, and for a moment, Korra was worried another burst of angry magic would sweep over them. Then worry creased the lines of her face and she sat down heavily. Her wand rolled away to one side of her desk as she covered her eyes, and she began to speak in a low, controlled tone. "Three years ago, Baatar's father reported a magical incident at one of his buildings. He's been designing them together with a witch, his wife. They're protective buildings that are imbued with magic to prevent possible attack." Asami stiffened in surprise or excitement—Korra wasn't entirely sure which it was, but it reminded her of the way she'd stared at the elevator. "This means, of course, that the buildings also prevent people from sensing magic happening _inside_ the structures. In theory. It hasn't been officially tested, at least by Congressional standards. Baatar's father—Baatar Sr.—was performing routine checks on the prototypes when he saw a red light from inside. Shortly after, Patrollers arrived on the scene. Baatar said—_claimed_—he'd just arrived, himself."

And then Korra remembered that last frantic day, the fear and confusion in Asami's eyes, the desperate grip of her hands.

Anything could be scary to the right person.

_Oblivion._

_Don't forget me._

That hazy, indistinct day finally made sense.

"They found her and tried to erase her memories. Because she's a muggle, and she saw magic," Korra finished. The Chief cast her an annoyed look over her hand. "No—I mean—I figured it out from the story, but I also _saw_ it."

The Chief lowered her hand away from her face. "Explain."

Korra opened her mouth to answer, but she found herself without the necessary words. How could she possibly explain the inexplicable? How could she explain the blue light, the meeting of hands, that intense feeling in the back of her throat?

She didn't have to. A familiar voice interjected, "It's not the first time magic has formed a connection between two people, Lin."

Instead of being startled, the Chief merely covered her eyes again and sighed. "Tenzin. Haven't I told you to knock first?"

Korra sunk down in her seat and desperately wished the floor would swallow her.

The last thing she needed was to get lectured. Especially in front of the Chief and Asami. Without looking, she knew exactly what Tenzin's eyebrows would be doing.

Maybe it was the perceived threat from her mentor. Maybe it was the stress from the attack earlier that day, the raggedness still lingering on the edges of her nerves. Maybe her desire to be swallowed by the floor somehow triggered something in those instinctual defenses she'd developed after leaping into the tear and to her death.

Regardless of the reason, it surprised all of them when, with great, wheezing breath, the blue magic flared and Korra simply vanished from the room.


End file.
